How can I add quotation marks to fields in a CSV file?

Question

I've got a CSV file like

Brand,Type,Color
Porsche,Sport,Red
BMW,Coupe,Blue

I'd like to include quotation marks to have it like:

"Brand","Type","Color"
"Porsche","Sport","Red"
"BMW","Coupe","Blue"

What's the fastest way to do it? I will implement it in a cronjob.

This might be a duplicate of: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/10754682/how-to-add-double-quotes-to-a-line-with-sed-or-awk ... :) — summea, Jun 17 '13 at 22:24
No problem! I hope it provides an answer for you that works :) — summea, Jun 17 '13 at 22:25

score 9 · Accepted Answer · answered Jun 17 '13 at 22:27

9

Using sed:

sed -e 's/^\|$/"/g' -e 's/,/","/g' input

answered Jun 17 '13 at 22:27

perreal

Note that this will mishandle any commas that appear within double quotes in the input file. It will also mishandle any values that are already double-quoted. In other words, it only works correctly if every value in the input file is unquoted. – John Karahalis May 03 '23 at 19:20

score 4 · Answer 2 · answered Jun 17 '13 at 23:25

4

It's often neater to use a language with a CSV library for CSV data:

ruby -rcsv -ne 'puts CSV.generate_line(CSV.parse_line($_), :force_quotes=>true)'

answered Jun 17 '13 at 23:25

glenn jackman

1

This is actually neat! It takes care of those cases 9as I had) where some fields were quoted and some were not. – SACHIN GARG Jan 07 '16 at 00:50

potong · Answer 3 · 2023-05-04T09:56:04.187

4

This might work for you (GNU sed):

sed -r 's/[^,]+/"&"/g' file

Accounting for the presence of "'s and escaped characters.

sed -E 's/[^\,"]*(("|[\].)[^"\,]*)*/"&"/g' file

edited May 04 '23 at 09:56

answered Jun 18 '13 at 05:53

potong

Note that this will mishandle any commas that appear within double quotes in the input file. It will also mishandle any values that are already double-quoted. In other words, it only works correctly if every value in the input file is unquoted. – John Karahalis May 03 '23 at 19:25
@JohnKarahalis if double quotes were to appear in the field I guess they would need to be escaped (otherwise it would be hard to reverse the required change). However a solution which takes this in mind might look like the above. – potong May 04 '23 at 09:55

score 3 · Answer 4 · answered Jun 18 '13 at 00:13

3

With awk:

awk '{gsub(/[^,]+/,"\"&\"")}1' file.csv

answered Jun 18 '13 at 00:13

jaypal singh

Note that this will mishandle any commas that appear within double quotes in the input file. It will also mishandle any values that are already double-quoted. In other words, it only works correctly if every value in the input file is unquoted. – John Karahalis May 03 '23 at 19:25

4 Answers4