wpcarro / slx

Less expressive but more ergonomic query language for tabular data than SQL

Simple Select

• Simple Select is a less expressive but more ergonomic query language for tabular data than SQL.
• slx is a command-line tool for querying CSVs using the Simple Select query language.

Simple Select queries look like this: director:"Tarantino" OR director:"Scorsese".

Example

Say we have the following data in a CSV:

title,year,rating,director
"Spirited Away",2001,8.5,"Hayao Miyazaki"
Andhadhun,2018,8.1,"Sriram Raghavan"
Dangal,2016,8.3,"Sriram Raghavan"
"Avengers: Infinity War",2019,8.4,"Anthony Russo"
Alien,1979,8.4,"Ridley Scott"
...

We can invoke slx like so...

$ slx -f /tmp/movies.csv

...and then query using the REPL:

> director:/S.*m/ OR director:"Hayao"
Andhadhun       2018    8.1     1       Sriram Raghavan 0       1
Dangal  2016    8.3     1       Sriram Raghavan 0       1
Howls Moving Castle     2004    8.2     0       Hayao Miyazaki  1       1
Judgment at Nuremberg   1961    8.1     0       Stanley Kramer  0       0
Laputa: Castle in the Sky       1986    8.0     0       Hayao Miyazaki  1       1
Nausicaa of the Valley of the Wind      1984    8.0     0       Hayao Miyazaki  1       1
Network 1976    8.1     0       Sidney Lumet    0       0

Warning

Simple Select is not intended for production use. I wrote this as a toy project for my own consumption. There are quite a few bugs of which I'm aware and quite a few other features that I'd like to support but haven't had time to support just yet.

Why publish it then? Maybe this project will inspire drive-by contributions or other, better-implemented spin-offs.

Wish List

Speaking of drive-by contributions, here are some things that I'd like to support:

• Implicit AND conjunctions (director:/Tarantino/ year:"2000" instead of director:/Tarantino/ AND year:"2000")
• Support for types like numbers, dates (year:2000 instead of year:"2000")
• slx should support CSV and (at the very least) sqlite3 file formats (open to other formats as well)
• Regexes should be the default query primitive (director:Tarantino instead of director:/Tarantino/)
• Improve parsing errors (including surfacing errors to the user)
• Support for reading from STDIN and issuing queries from the command-line
• Unit-testing
• Configurable delimiters for output data (right now it's just \t)
• (Maybe) rewrite in a faster, more-type-safe languages (e.g. Rust)

I'm likely missing other FRs, bugs, so please file issues!