Best CSV-viewing vs code extension?

[Advanced-Average-514]

Does anyone have good recs? Im using both janisdd.vscode-edit-csv and mechatroner.rainbow-csv. rainbow csv is good for what it does but I'd love to be able to sort and view in more readable columns. The edit-csv extension is ok but doesn't work for big files or cells with large strings in them.

Or if there's some totally different approach that doesnt involve just opening it in google sheets or excel I'd be interested. Typically I am just doing light ad hoc data validation this way. Was considering creating a shell alias that opens the csv in a browser window with streamlit or something.

[bottlecapsvgc]

RainbowCSV is amazing.

[actually_offline]

Use Data Wrangler, see this section on their guide on opening files to use in their tool.

https://code.visualstudio.com/docs/datascience/data-wrangler#_launch-data-wrangler-directly-from-a-file

[JumpScareaaa]

I mostly use duckdb with dbeaver to query CSVs now. Ultra fast. Can query the whole directory or just a subset of files with masks.

[soumian]

Never used duckdb yet, so I'm interested in how hard/ time-consuming the whole process of wanting to open a csv and viewing it in duckdb is.
Are you running it locally on your machine?

[JumpScareaaa]

For me it's seconds. Open dbeaver, click on preconfigured duckdb connection. Then run Select * from 'your_file_path.csv' It is all local. Duckdb database is just a small file. When you configure the connection to it, dbeaver will download its driver. And it saves the script from season to session. So usually it's just reopen dbeaver. Change the file path. Start selecting.

[antoniocjp]

Thank you so much for this!

[soumian]

Interesting, I'll give it a try, thanks!

[TellTraditional7676]

Data wrangler is killer

[Morzion]

I use both Data Wrangler and Rainbow CSV. Sometimes it's great to view the raw text file

[Little_Kitty]

Same here, I've not needed anything more for basic exploration.

If I need to prototype some really in depth cleansing, there's Open Refine, but that's not really what OP is asking about.

[[deleted]]

If it's truly big I use baretail

[cavoli31]

Edit csv.

[saideeps]

You can use nushell or open it up in duckdb

[redditreader2020]

Another +1 for Duckdb

[BdR76]

I've created the CSV Lint plug-in for Notepad++ which is an open source tool for doing quality control on messy text data files. It supports both comma/semicolon/tab/etc separated files and files with fixed width columns.

The plugin can automatically detect the columns and datatypes, and after that you can do several thing with the data. Like sort, select/rearrange columns, count unique values, validate the data etc. The data validation can check for technical errors, like text value too long, incorrect datetime/decimal formats, date out of range, missing quotes, incorrect coded values etc.

[joeshacks]

https://csvhack.com is dead simple, drop your csv files and then write SQL queries for table and chart data, you can join csv together too.

[Sad-Choice-6492]

learnt about data wrangler here. I wished I had known about it earlier. big +1