How to parse a CSV in a Bash script?

Question

I am trying to parse a CSV containing potentially 100k+ lines. Here is the criteria I have:

1. The index of the identifier
2. The identifier value

I would like to retrieve all lines in the CSV that have the given value in the given index (delimited by commas).

Any ideas, taking in special consideration for performance?

Answer 1

As an alternative to cut- or awk-based one-liners, you could use the specialized csvtool aka ocaml-csv:

$ csvtool -t ',' col "$index" - < csvfile | grep "$value"

According to the docs, it handles escaping, quoting, etc.