2025-10-17 - CSV Viewer With Awk And Gopher
===========================================
I scattered CSV files throughout my gopherhole. It recently occurred
to me to make them more viewable within gopher clients. My basic
strategy is to use `uncsv` to convert to TSV format, and then use an
AWK script to flatten the data for viewing in gopher clients. This
follows conventions of keeping the intelligence server side rather
than leaning on client-side scripting.
> Intelligence is held by the server. ... Further intelligence to be
> borne by the protocol should be minimized.
>
> From: RFC 1436
uncsv
RFC 1436
Recently i wrote a similar AWK script to flatten tabular data.
Awesome Curated List of Mind Expanding Books
For this post, i adapted this script to work with any CSV file.
See items below for code.
csv2gph.sh
csv2gph.awk
I use it like so:
bin/csv2gph.sh public_gopher/books/serial-reading.csv \
public_gopher/books/serial-reading/index.gph
You can view the resulting gophermaps below.
free-ebooks.csv
serial-reading.csv
to-read.csv
The gophermaps link to the original CSV files, to make it easy to
access the data outside of the gopher client.
tags: book,technical
Tags
====
book
technical