How to read values in a particular column of a CSV file in Batch?

I am planning to write a batch script wherein I need to scan the values from a particular column of a CSV file one by one and store them in a variable for further processing.

Say, following is the CSV file:

A1 B1 C1 D1 E1
A2 B2 C2 D2 E2
A3 B3 C3 D3 E3
.. .. .. .. ..

I have to read D1, execute a command using it's value, read D2, execute a command, and so on.

How can this be achieved?

4 Answers

Suppose you have a space-delimited file named yourfile.csv, and you want to read the fourth (D1) column, you should execute this:

for /F "tokens=4 delims= " %i in (yourfile.csv) do @echo %i

On windows 7 with powershell you can easly parse the csv with Import-Csv EX:

Import-Csv -Delimiter " " -Header a,b,c,d,e c:\the.csv | foreach{ Write-Host $_.d }

Here's a batch file I wrote up to dump a list of all my domain users (several thousand) into a file, one username per file (order not important). Since the "net group" command dumps the list of users in THREE columns (fixed width), I used the "token" syntax in the following batch file to do this.

@echo off
REM * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
REM Turns three-column output from NET GROUP command into a
REM single column of domain usernames
REM * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
SET NGCSV=UserList3Col.csv
SET NGCSVT1=UserList3Col.csv.temp1
SET NGCSVT2=UserList3Col.csv.temp2
SET NGFINAL=UserListFinal.txt
setlocal EnableDelayedExpansion
net group /domain "Domain Users" > %NGCSV%
REM * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
REM Now strip out the crap
REM ...make a temporary copy
COPY %NGCSV% %NGCSVT2%
REM ...strip off the crap using alternating temp files
findstr /B /L /V /C:"The request" %NGCSVT2% > %NGCSVT1%
findstr /B /L /V /C:"Group name" %NGCSVT1% > %NGCSVT2%
findstr /B /L /V /C:"Comment" %NGCSVT2% > %NGCSVT1%
findstr /B /L /V /C:"Members" %NGCSVT1% > %NGCSVT2%
findstr /B /L /V /C:"-----" %NGCSVT2% > %NGCSVT1%
findstr /B /L /V /C:"The command" %NGCSVT1% > %NGCSVT2%
REM ...make the last temporary copy the final copy and clean up
COPY %NGCSVT2% %NGCSV%
DEL %NGCSVT1%
DEL %NGCSVT2%
REM * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
REM Now convert it all to one column
del %NGFINAL%
REM ...Column 1
for /F "tokens=1" %%A in (%NGCSV%) do @echo %%A >> %NGFINAL%
REM ...Column 2
for /F "tokens=2" %%A in (%NGCSV%) do @echo %%A >> %NGFINAL%
REM ...Column 3
for /F "tokens=3" %%A in (%NGCSV%) do @echo %%A >> %NGFINAL%

(Note that "!" characters in usernames aren't handled by this batch file, but that didn't affect me.)

I also recommend using this article: ...to learn more about how delimiters are treated.

Check out the answers on this question... It's not exactly the same, but it goes over parsing a csv file in a batch script: