Whitespace by default (matches `awk '{print $N}'` behavior). Toggle to comma, tab, or custom for specific formats.

Multi-column extraction?

Yes — specify multiple column indexes. Output is in the order you specified.

What about quoted fields?

CSV-style quoted fields (with commas inside) are respected when delimiter is comma. For whitespace mode, quotes are literal characters.

Column Extract is a one-shot data-wrangling tool. CSV Viewer is for exploration. Pipeline: Viewer to explore, Extract to transform.

A worked example, rendered from real sample data. Sign in to run the tool on your own input.

Input

id,name,email,role
1,ada,ada@example.com,admin
2,linus,linus@example.com,user
3,grace,grace@example.com,editor

Output

1
2
3

Pull the Nth whitespace-delimited column from each line. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the Data / SQL collection.

AWK, the language this tool mimics, was created by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan at Bell Labs in 1977 — the name is their initials.
The 'cut' command in Unix, an alternative to awk for column extraction, was introduced in System III Unix (1982) and supports both delimiter and character-based fields.
AWK was so influential that it inspired Perl, which Larry Wall designed in 1987 partly to combine the capabilities of awk, sed, and shell scripting.

What delimiter?: Whitespace by default (matches `awk '{print $N}'` behavior). Toggle to comma, tab, or custom for specific formats.
Multi-column extraction?: Yes — specify multiple column indexes. Output is in the order you specified.
What about quoted fields?: CSV-style quoted fields (with commas inside) are respected when delimiter is comma. For whitespace mode, quotes are literal characters.
How is this different from csv-viewer?: Column Extract is a one-shot data-wrangling tool. CSV Viewer is for exploration. Pipeline: Viewer to explore, Extract to transform.

A worked example, rendered from real sample data. Sign in to run the tool on your own input.

Input

id,name,email,role
1,ada,ada@example.com,admin
2,linus,linus@example.com,user
3,grace,grace@example.com,editor

Output

1
2
3

Pull the Nth whitespace-delimited column from each line. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the Data / SQL collection.

AWK, the language this tool mimics, was created by Alfred Aho, Peter Weinberger, and Brian Kernighan at Bell Labs in 1977 — the name is their initials.
The 'cut' command in Unix, an alternative to awk for column extraction, was introduced in System III Unix (1982) and supports both delimiter and character-based fields.
AWK was so influential that it inspired Perl, which Larry Wall designed in 1987 partly to combine the capabilities of awk, sed, and shell scripting.

What delimiter?: Whitespace by default (matches `awk '{print $N}'` behavior). Toggle to comma, tab, or custom for specific formats.
Multi-column extraction?: Yes — specify multiple column indexes. Output is in the order you specified.
What about quoted fields?: CSV-style quoted fields (with commas inside) are respected when delimiter is comma. For whitespace mode, quotes are literal characters.
How is this different from csv-viewer?: Column Extract is a one-shot data-wrangling tool. CSV Viewer is for exploration. Pipeline: Viewer to explore, Extract to transform.