til/unix/count-the-lines-in-a-csv-where-a-column-is-empty.md

Count The Lines In A CSV Where A Column Is Empty

The xsv utility is a fast way to analyze and work with CSV files from the command line.

With the search subcommand, I can seach for lines that match a pattern and even narrow that search to focus on a selected column.

For instance, to search for any lines where column 3 is empty:

$ xsv search -s 3 '^$' data.csv

The -s 3 narrows the search to just column 3. The '^$' regex pattern matches on cells where there is the start character (^) and end character ($) with nothing in between, hence empty.

I can then pipe that to wc -l to get a count of the number of empty lines.

$ xsv search -s 3 '^$' data.csv | wc -l

See xsv search --help for more details.