hledger_csv(5) hledger User Manuals hledger_csv(5) NAME CSV - how hledger reads CSV data, and the CSV rules file format DESCRIPTION hledger can read CSV (comma-separated value) files as if they were journal files, automatically converting each CSV record into a transac- tion. (To learn about writing CSV, see CSV output.) Converting CSV to transactions requires some special conversion rules. These do several things: o they describe the layout and format of the CSV data o they can customize the generated journal entries (transactions) using a simple templating language o they can add refinements based on patterns in the CSV data, eg cate- gorizing transactions with more detailed account names. When reading a CSV file named FILE.csv, hledger looks for a conversion rules file named FILE.csv.rules in the same directory. You can over- ride this with the --rules-file option. If the rules file does not ex- ist, hledger will auto-create one with some example rules, which you'll need to adjust. At minimum, the rules file must identify the date and amount fields. It's often necessary to specify the date format, and the number of header lines to skip, also. Eg: fields date, _, _, amount date-format %d/%m/%Y skip 1 More examples in the EXAMPLES section below. CSV RULES The following kinds of rule can appear in the rules file, in any order (except for end which can appear only inside a conditional block). Blank lines and lines beginning with # or ; are ignored. skip skip N The word "skip" followed by a number (or no number, meaning 1) tells hledger to ignore this many non-empty lines preceding the CSV data. (Empty/blank lines are skipped automatically.) You'll need this when- ever your CSV data contains header lines. It also has a second purpose: it can be used to ignore certain CSV records, see conditional blocks below. fields fields FIELDNAME1, FIELDNAME2, ... A fields list ("fields" followed by one or more comma-separated field names) is the quick way to assign CSV field values to hledger fields. It (a) names the CSV fields, in order (names may not contain white- space; fields you don't care about can be left unnamed), and (b) as- signs them to hledger fields if you use standard hledger field names. Here's an example: # use the 1st, 2nd and 4th CSV fields as the transaction's date, description and amount, # ignore the 3rd, 5th and 6th fields, # and name the 7th and 8th fields for later reference: # 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 fields date, description, , amount1, , , somefield, anotherfield Here are the standard hledger field names: Transaction fields date, date2, status, code, description, comment can be used to form the transaction's first line. Only date is required. (See also date-for- mat below.) Posting fields accountN, where N is 1 to 9, sets the Nth posting's account name. Most often there are two postings, so you'll want to set account1 and ac- count2. A number of field/pseudo-field names are available for setting posting amounts: o amountN sets posting N's amount o amountN-in and amountN-out can be used instead, if the CSV has sepa- rate fields for debits and credits o currencyN sets a currency symbol to be left-prefixed to the amount, useful if the CSV provides that as a separate field o balanceN sets a (separate) balance assertion amount (or when no post- ing amount is set, a balance assignment) If you write these with no number (amount, amount-in, amount-out, cur- rency, balance), it means posting 1. Also, if you set an amount for posting 1 only, a second posting that balances the transaction will be generated automatically. This helps support CSV rules created before hledger 1.16. Finally, commentN sets a comment on the Nth posting. Comments can of course contain tags. (field assignment) HLEDGERFIELDNAME FIELDVALUE Instead of or in addition to a fields list, you can assign a value to a hledger field by writing its name (any of the standard names above) followed by a text value. The value may contain interpolated CSV fields, referenced by their 1-based position in the CSV record (%N), or by the name they were given in the fields list (%CSVFIELDNAME). Eg: # set the amount to the 4th CSV field, with " USD" appended amount %4 USD # combine three fields to make a comment, containing note: and date: tags comment note: %somefield - %anotherfield, date: %1 Interpolation strips any outer whitespace, so a CSV value like " 1 " becomes 1 when interpolated (#1051). Note you can only interpolate CSV fields, not the hledger fields being assigned to; for more on this, see TIPS. date-format date-format DATEFMT This is a helper for the date (and date2) fields. If your CSV dates are not formatted like YYYY-MM-DD, YYYY/MM/DD or YYYY.MM.DD, you'll need to specify the format by writing "date-format" followed by a strp- time-like date parsing pattern, which must parse the date field values completely. Examples: # for dates like "11/06/2013": date-format %m/%d/%Y # for dates like "6/11/2013". The - allows leading zeros to be optional. date-format %-d/%-m/%Y # for dates like "2013-Nov-06": date-format %Y-%h-%d # for dates like "11/6/2013 11:32 PM": date-format %-m/%-d/%Y %l:%M %p if if PATTERN RULE if PATTERN PATTERN PATTERN RULE RULE Conditional blocks apply one or more rules to CSV records which are matched by any of the PATTERNs. This allows transactions to be cus- tomised or categorised based on patterns in the data. A single pattern can be written on the same line as the "if"; or multi- ple patterns can be written on the following lines, non-indented. Patterns are case-insensitive regular expressions which try to match any part of the whole CSV record. It's not yet possible to match within a specific field. Note the CSV record they see is close but not identical to the one in the CSV file; eg double quotes are removed, and the separator character becomes comma. After the patterns, there should be one or more rules to apply, all in- dented by at least one space. Three kinds of rule are allowed in con- ditional blocks: o field assignments (to set a field's value) o skip (to skip the matched CSV record) o end (to skip all remaining CSV records). Examples: # if the CSV record contains "groceries", set account2 to "expenses:groceries" if groceries account2 expenses:groceries # if the CSV record contains any of these patterns, set account2 and comment as shown if monthly service fee atm transaction fee banking thru software account2 expenses:business:banking comment XXX deductible ? check it end As mentioned above, this rule can be used inside conditional blocks (only) to cause hledger to stop reading CSV records and proceed with command execution. Eg: # ignore everything following the first empty record if ,,,, end include include RULESFILE Include another CSV rules file at this point, as if it were written in- line. RULESFILE is an absolute file path or a path relative to the current file's directory. This can be useful eg for reusing common rules in several rules files: # someaccount.csv.rules ## someaccount-specific rules fields date,description,amount account1 some:account account2 some:misc ## common rules include categorisation.rules newest-first hledger always sorts the generated transactions by date. Transactions on the same date should appear in the same order as their CSV records, as hledger can usually auto-detect whether the CSV's normal order is oldest first or newest first. But if all of the following are true: o the CSV might sometimes contain just one day of data (all records having the same date) o the CSV records are normally in reverse chronological order (newest first) o and you care about preserving the order of same-day transactions you should add the newest-first rule as a hint. Eg: # tell hledger explicitly that the CSV is normally newest-first newest-first EXAMPLES A more complete example, generating three-posting transactions: # hledger CSV rules for amazon.com order history # sample: # "Date","Type","To/From","Name","Status","Amount","Fees","Transaction ID" # "Jul 29, 2012","Payment","To","Adapteva, Inc.","Completed","$25.00","$0.00","17LA58JSK6PRD4HDGLNJQPI1PB9N8DKPVHL" # skip one header line skip 1 # name the csv fields (and assign the transaction's date, amount and code) fields date, _, toorfrom, name, amzstatus, amount1, fees, code # how to parse the date date-format %b %-d, %Y # combine two fields to make the description description %toorfrom %name # save these fields as tags comment status:%amzstatus # set the base account for all transactions account1 assets:amazon # flip the sign on the amount amount -%amount # Put fees in a separate posting amount3 %fees comment3 fees For more examples, see Convert CSV files. TIPS Reading multiple CSV files You can read multiple CSV files at once using multiple -f arguments on the command line. hledger will look for a correspondingly-named rules file for each CSV file. If you use the --rules-file option, that rules file will be used for all the CSV files. Deduplicating, importing When you download a CSV file repeatedly, eg to get your latest bank transactions, the new file may contain some of the same records as the old one. The print --new command is one simple way to detect just the new transactions. Or better still, the import command appends those new transactions to your main journal. This is the easiest way to im- port CSV data. Eg, after downloading your latest CSV files: $ hledger import *.csv [--dry] Other import methods A number of other tools and workflows, hledger-specific and otherwise, exist for converting, deduplicating, classifying and managing CSV data. See: o https://hledger.org -> sidebar -> real world setups o https://plaintextaccounting.org -> data import/conversion Valid CSV hledger accepts CSV conforming to RFC 4180. Some things to note when values are enclosed in quotes: o you must use double quotes (not single quotes) o spaces outside the quotes are not allowed Other separator characters With the --separator 'CHAR' option, hledger will expect the separator to be CHAR instead of a comma. Ie it will read other "Character Sepa- rated Values" formats, such as TSV (Tab Separated Values). Note: on the command line, use a real tab character in quotes, not Eg: $ hledger -f foo.tsv --separator ' ' print (Experimental.) Setting amounts A posting amount can be set in one of these ways: o by assigning (with a fields list or field assigment) to amountN (posting N's amount) or amount (posting 1's amount) o by assigning to amountN-in and amountN-out (or amount-in and amount- out). For each CSV record, whichever of these has a non-zero value will be used, with appropriate sign. If both contain a non-zero value, this may not work. o by assigning to balanceN (or balance) instead of the above, setting the amount indirectly via a balance assignment. There is some special handling for sign in amounts: o If an amount value is parenthesised, it will be de-parenthesised and sign-flipped. o If an amount value begins with a double minus sign, those cancel out and are removed. If the currency/commodity symbol is provided as a separate CSV field, you can assign it to currency (affects all posting amounts) or curren- cyN (affects just posting N's amount). The symbol will be prepended to the amount. Or for more control, you can set both currency symbol and amount with a field assignment, eg: fields date,description,currency,amount # add currency symbol on the right: amount %amount %currency Referencing other fields In field assignments, you can interpolate only CSV fields, not hledger fields. In the example below, there's both a CSV field and a hledger field named amount1, but %amount1 always means the CSV field, not the hledger field: # Name the third CSV field "amount1" fields date,description,amount1 # Set hledger's amount1 to the CSV amount1 field followed by USD amount1 %amount1 USD # Set comment to the CSV amount1 (not the amount1 assigned above) comment %amount1 Here, since there's no CSV amount1 field, %amount1 will produce a lit- eral "amount1": fields date,description,csvamount amount1 %csvamount USD # Can't interpolate amount1 here comment %amount1 When there are multiple field assignments to the same hledger field, only the last one takes effect. Here, comment's value will be be B, or C if "something" is matched, but never A: comment A comment B if something comment C How CSV rules are evaluated Here's how to think of CSV rules being evaluated (if you really need to). First, o include - all includes are inlined, from top to bottom, depth first. (At each include point the file is inlined and scanned for further includes, before proceeding.) Then "global" rules are evaluated, top to bottom. If a rule is re- peated, the last one wins: o skip (at top level) o date-format o newest-first o fields - names the CSV fields, optionally sets up initial assignments to hledger fields Then for each CSV record in turn: o test all if blocks. If any of them contain a end rule, skip all re- maining CSV records. Otherwise if any of them contain a skip rule, skip that many CSV records. If there are multiple matched skip rules, the first one wins. o collect all field assignments at top level and in matched if blocks. When there are multiple assignments for a field, keep only the last one. o compute a value for each hledger field - either the one that was as- signed to it (and interpolate the %CSVFIELDNAME references), or a de- fault o generate a synthetic hledger transaction from these values, which be- comes part of the input to the hledger command that has been selected Valid transactions hledger currently does not post-process and validate transactions gen- erated from CSV as thoroughly as transactions read from a journal file. This means that if your rules are wrong, you can generate invalid transactions. Or, amounts may not be displayed with a canonical dis- play style. So when setting up or adjusting CSV rules, you should check your re- sults visually with the print command. You can pipe print's output through hledger once more to validate and canonicalise fully. Eg: $ hledger -f some.csv print | hledger -f- print -I (The -I/--ignore-assertions flag disables balance assertion checks, usually needed when re-parsing print output.) REPORTING BUGS Report bugs at http://bugs.hledger.org (or on the #hledger IRC channel or hledger mail list) AUTHORS Simon Michael and contributors COPYRIGHT Copyright (C) 2007-2019 Simon Michael. Released under GNU GPL v3 or later. SEE ALSO hledger(1), hledger-ui(1), hledger-web(1), hledger-api(1), hledger_csv(5), hledger_journal(5), hledger_timeclock(5), hledger_time- dot(5), ledger(1) http://hledger.org hledger 1.15.99 September 2019 hledger_csv(5)