Programming Praxis

Regular readers of this blog know that. in my day job, I frequently process input files from vendors; almost always, they were created in Excel and arrive in CSV format. Sometimes I have to peek inside the files, looking for invalid data, and I have commonly used grep for that task. Sometimes grep gives me unwanted records, because there is a match in some field that is not the field of interested, and I just ignore the extra records. But the other day I had a mess, with lots of unwanted records, so I used awk to parse out the fields and find the records of interest.

I realized as I was performing that task that it would be useful to have a version of grep that understood the CSV file format. So I wrote grep-csv that takes a field number (counting from 1, like awk) and a regular expression and returns the matching rows of a CSV file.

Your task is to write a grep-csv program. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.

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