After stumbling upon the same issue, I realized that this is not a bug,
but intended behavior.
The output of csvtool is always a valid csv-formatted record again. It
removes any obsolete double quotes, but it keeps all *necessary* double
quotes.
In your example, csvtool gives the following output
$csvtool col 1,2,3 test.csv
foo,"""Hello "" World!""",bar
which is indeed a correct csv-record. Moreover, the double quotes are
neccessary, since the unescaped output
foo,"Hello " World!",bar
would yield a corrupt csv-record.
The same holds even true for the output's separator char as defined by
the -u flag. Consider the following example:
$ echo "\"single,field\",next one" | csvtool col 1,2 -
"single,field",next one
Again the surrounding quotes are *not* removed because they are
mandatory because of the comma inside the field. However, when
specifying by -u ; another output separator, the double quotes become
obsolete and will be removed:
$ echo "\"single,field\",next one" | csvtool col 1,2 -u ";" -
single,field;next one
Summarized: csvtool focuses on generating valid csv output, *not* on
extracting individual field values in always their unescaped form.
Unfortunately, this means that one needs another commandline tool to
post-process the somtimes-escaped-sometimes-unescaped output of csvtool
when trying to use it in scripts to extract a single column.
It could be a feature request (and indeed a very helpful feature) to
support a flag that forces the output to be unescaped without any
surrounding double quotes, e.g., csvtool --unquoted col 2 test.csv could
give "Hello " World!" then, which is intended for further processing,
rather than """Hello "" World!""".
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1714760
Title:
"csvtool" returns wrong output when escaping double quotes
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