Rainbow CSV extension will make your life easier if you’re working with CSV and TSV files.

Highlight in different colors

By default, if you open a CSV file it looks like plain text which makes it difficult to quickly understand what’s going on.

This is where Rainbow CSV’s main functionality comes into play.

Once you install it, you’ll see the CSV data highlighted with nice colors that make it easy to understand what’s going on.

Align columns

Rainbow CSV can also format the CSV file.

Click on the Align button at the bottom of the editor to format the file and then you can change it back by clicking the Shrink button.

Query the data

Another cool feature allows you to query the data using RBQL (Rainbow Query Language).

Let’s assume that we want to select everyone whose name is not Alex and who weighs more than 50 kgs.

The column a1would store the name and the column a5would store the weight in kilograms.

This is how the query looks like:

SELECT * WHERE a1 != 'Alex' && a5 > 50

Conclusion

Rainbow CSV provides plenty of other useful features but I’ll let you discover them on your own.

All in all, this is a great tool that makes things a lot easier if you’re working with CSV of TSV files.

Happy coding!

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