csv file in excel and saved it as .txt and when I count the lines using wc -l there is one line less in the .txt format 17768 vs 17769.
Thanks!
Try this instead:
cat results1.csv | tr "," "\t" > results1.txt
wc -l counts the number of new lines, not the number of lines. If your file ends with the last character of the last line, it will amount to one fewer line than the other file but diff would ignore differences. Try running a diff.
echo "Hello World" | wc
1 2 12
As you can see, the above has ` line and 12 characters, whereas the one below where the new line is suppressed has 0 lines and 11 characters.
echo -n "Hello World" | wc
0 2 11
.csv is a file name extension for comma separated values while .txt is a file name extension for a plain text file. The former strongly alludes to its content format (comma separated values) whereas the latter only speaks of the nature of the content (plain text), not its format.
What is the difference between the content in the two files? If they're the same, you can simply copy/soft-link one to the other (an unnecessary step). If there is an actual difference, you could use sed to go from one to the other.
Thanks but my questions is very simple I only have curiosity to know how I would save a .csv as a .txt. I looked this up and it seemed overwhelmingly complicated and I don’t understand why, it should be simple a simple command that can take one and produce the other.
No need to convert. csv is a text file where all the columns in the text file are separated by commas. If it is a text file where all the columns are separated by tab, then it is a tsv file. Based on the separator (in this case comma), text files are called csv, tsv etc. An apt question could be how to convert the one separator (comma) to another separator (tab) for any given text file.
As mentioned csv is already a plain text format with "," or ";" as a separator. Two options:
mv myfile.csv myfile.txt.doing that will print: cat test.txt
FBgn0286941,0,0,0,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,NA,0,0,0,0,0,0
not what I want, I want to print tab-separated fields like this:
FBgn0286941 0 0 0 NA NA NA NA NA NA NA NA 0 0 0 0 0 0
Also, I don't want to replace the file so instead of mv one would use cp to keep the csv and the txt versions
You can open the CSV file in Excel, again, but ensure that Excel has correctly interpreted that the commas are the field delimiters. If it has correctly interpreted this, then the values will appear in multiple columns. Then save the file as TXT (tab-delimited).
Alternatively, if you have Mac or Linux, open a terminal and convert all commas to tabs via:
sed 's/,/\t/g' test.csv > test.tsv
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version 2.3.6
Hello again. You could check the output of
headandtailon both files, and that should reveal the discrepancy.Kevin
I did all lines match in both files
You could try the
diffcommand. The discrepancy is likely related to encoding and end-line characters, e.g., Windows carriage returns (\r) versus end-line characters on Linux (\n)head/tailwould have freaked out on one of the files if the line endings had been different between them.The initial assumption with
headandtailwas that there may have been a blank line at the beginning or end of one of the files. We cannot see the user's actions from where we are sitting.