NSV, CLI tool

Command-line tool for the NSV (Newline-Separated Values) format.

Installation

To install (or update) from crates.io, run

cargo install nsv-cli

Usage

nsv help     # proper summary
nsv version  # this tool + underlying parser's versions

Sanitize

Clean up files corrupted by Microsoft's software.

# From file
nsv sanitize dirty.nsv > clean.nsv

# From stdin
cat dirty.nsv | nsv sanitize > clean.nsv

The sanitize command:

• Strips UTF-8 BOM
• Normalizes CRLF to LF
• Errors on bare CR or mixed line endings
• NSV-agnostic, can be used on any text file

Validate

Check encoding and structural correctness.

nsv validate data.nsv
nsv validate --table data.nsv

The validate command:

• Checks for rejected strings: dangling backslashes, unknown escape sequences, missing termination
• Reports byte offsets and UTF-8-aware character columns for each issue (rely on byte offsets if you're not using UTF-8)
• with --table, checks that all rows have equal length
• Exits with 0 on success, 1 on warnings or errors

Transpose

Transpose a table.
Both t and transpose are valid, prefer the latter for long-living scripts.

nsv t table.nsv
cat table.nsv | nsv t

The transpose command:

• Requires table input (all rows must have equal arity), errors on ragged data
• Allocates full input in memory (once, but still)

Stats

Structural overview of an NSV file. Output is itself NSV (2-column key-value table).

$ nsv stats data.nsv
rows
3

cells
12

min_arity
4

max_arity
4

is_table
true

max_cell_bytes
1

Lift / Unlift

Apply or reverse NSV escaping on each line.

# Lift: escape each line (empty lines become \, backslashes double, etc.)
nsv lift data.nsv

# Unlift: unescape each line (inverse of lift)
nsv unlift data.nsv

# Roundtrip: unlift(lift(x)) == x
nsv lift data.nsv | nsv unlift

The lift command:

• Applies escape to each line of input
• Turns empty lines into \ (the NSV empty cell token)
• Is the line-level equivalent of the lift operation from the ENSV spec

The unlift command:

• Applies unescape to each line of input
• Is the exact inverse of lift