Tabalyst documentation

Tabalyst is an open-source, local-first toolkit for understanding unfamiliar structured data. Install it once and use its tools from the command line or from Python:

• Tabalyst Report turns a CSV, JSON, JSONL or Excel file into an interactive HTML report and a JSON profile.
• Tabalyst Scan describes every field of a file in one JSON document.
• Tabalyst Inspect finds how to read a JSON, JSONL or Excel file.
• Tabalyst Sample samples CSV files to create smaller datasets.
• Tabalyst Dedup finds the exact duplicate rows of CSV files and writes the unique rows, the repeated rows and every copy to new CSV files.
• Tabalyst Generate creates synthetic CSV datasets.

pip install --upgrade tabalyst
tabalyst report customers.csv

This creates customers.html (the report), customers.json (the profile) and executions.json (the run history) beside the CSV file. Everything runs on your computer; no data is sent anywhere.

Tabalyst is in beta and changes often: run the first command again before each new test. Commands and the JSON formats may still change between versions. This documentation describes the latest release published on PyPI.

What do you want to do?

Goal	Page
Install or update Tabalyst	Install Tabalyst
Try it step by step	Create your first report
See a finished report	Examples and demos
Report one or many CSV files	Report CSV files
Report a JSON or JSONL file	Report JSON and JSONL files
Report an Excel workbook	Report Excel workbooks
Choose which array of a JSON file is analyzed	Inspect JSON and JSONL files
Choose which sheet or table of a workbook is analyzed	Inspect Excel workbooks
Describe every field of a file as JSON	Scan CSV and JSON files
Cut a large CSV down	Sample CSV files
Remove or list the exact duplicate rows of a CSV file	Tabalyst Dedup
Create synthetic CSV data	Tabalyst Generate
Change delimiter, encoding or detection	Configuration
Find a command or an option	Command line (CLI)
Use Tabalyst from Python	Python API
Read a generated JSON file in a script	JSON profile, scan format, Inspect format
Know what is not supported yet	Known limitations

Sections

• Overview: this page.
• Get started: install, first report and examples and demos.
• Tabalyst Report: overview, CSV, JSON and Excel guides, the JSON profile and its changelog.
• Tabalyst Inspect: overview, the JSON and Excel guides, the Inspect format and its changelog.
• Tabalyst Scan: overview, the guide, the scan format, its changelog and query caches.
• Tabalyst Sample: Sample CSV files.
• Tabalyst Dedup: overview, batches and already processed files, exactness, memory and limits, the report format and its changelog.
• Tabalyst Generate: overview and examples and CLI options.
• Reference: command line, Python API, configuration, execution history and the glossary.
• About Tabalyst: concepts, known limitations, release notes and contributing and issues.

For AI assistants

To get help from an AI assistant, paste this prompt into a chat that can read web pages:

Read the complete Tabalyst documentation at
https://docs.tabalyst.com/llms-full.txt, then help me use Tabalyst well.
Ask me what my data looks like and what I want to learn from it, then suggest
the right commands and options. Base your answers only on that documentation.

If the assistant cannot open links, paste the content of the file instead.

This site publishes plain-text versions of its pages:

• llms.txt lists every page with a one-line description.
• llms-full.txt holds the whole documentation in one file.
• Every page is also available as Markdown by adding .md to its URL, for example report.md.