Is there a way to have vd output in the stdout?

[aborruso]

Hi,
is there a way to run something like the command below (-of is only an example parameter)?

vd input.csv -b -of json  |  jq '.something'

Thank you

[saulpw]

Yes; use vd input.csv -b --save-filetype json | jq ...

[aborruso]

@saulpw is there a way to hide vd messages?

If I run vd input.csv -b --save-filetype tsv | grep 'a' I have

opening input.csv as csv
saving 1 sheets to - as tsv
- save finished
id      data

Is there a way to have only id data?

Thank you

[saulpw]

Those messages go to stderr, so if you redirect stderr then you should only see the data:

vd [...] 2> /dev/null

[aborruso]

Thank you very much: I created a related PR visidata/visidata.org#46

[saulbert]

On the per-path-filetype branch (PR #3139), the output format for a conversion can be set explicitly with -of / --output-filetype, independent of the output name — handy when streaming to stdout, where there is no extension to infer from:

vd -b data.csv -of json -o -     # csv → json on stdout
vd -b data.csv -of json | jq .   # same, piped

Previously the saver came from the -o filename's extension (or the save_filetype option); -of lets you choose it directly.

[this message written by Claude Opus 4.8 and approved by @saulpw]