Re: Different delimiter for 'collapse'

[Erik Auerswald]

Hi,

On 13.02.21 22:09, Shawn Wagner wrote:
> On Sat, Feb 13, 2021 at 11:11 AM Eric Powell <powell.eric@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > Datamash is such a wonderful piece of software and I am so happy to have
> > discovered it.
> > One feature that I wish was available is to change the delimiter for the
> > collapse operation.  My data has commas in it already so I cannot
> > distinguish between those and the commas produced by collapse.  It would be
> > great if there was a command-line flag allowing the user to choose the
> > delimiter used by collapse.
> I actually have a patch to do this ready to commit when I find the time and
> remember to work on it... but I never was happy with the long-form name for
> the option I used (--collapse-delimiter). Any better suggestions?

The datamash version installed on my system documents two commands that
create a comma-separated list of values: unique and collapse.  A global
option changing the collapse separator should IMHO also change the
unique separator.  So perhaps '--csv-delimiter' or '--csv-separator'?

The tool "rec2csv"[0] from GNU recutils uses '-d, --delim', but the name
used for datamash should make it obvious that a different delimiter or
separator than '-t, --field-separator' is controlled.

Thanks,
Erik

[0] https://www.gnu.org/software/recutils/manual/Invoking-rec2csv.html