Select Columns from Structured Text Files

Python pandas¶

My first choice is pandas in Python. However, below are some tools for quick and dirty solutions.

q¶

q -t -H 'select c1, c3 from file.txt'

cut¶

cut -d\t -f1,3 file.txt

awk¶

awk -F'\t' '{print $1 "\t" $3}' file.tsv 

Note: neither cut nor awk honors escaped characters. For working on complicated structured text files, pandas in Python is a much better solution.