Many different npm modules let you read from a CSV file.

Most of them are based on streams, like csv-parser or node-csv.

Those are great to deal with CSV in a production system.

I like to keep things simple when I don’t have performance in mind. For example, for a one-time parsing of CSV that I had to do to consolidate my backend systems.

To do so, I used neat-csv, a package that exposes the csv-parser functionality to a simple async/await interface.

Install it using npm install neat-csv and require it in your app:

const neatCsv = require('neat-csv');

then load the CSV from the filesystem and invoke neatCsv passing the content of the file:

const fs = require('fs')

fs.readFile('./file.csv', async (err, data) => {
  if (err) {
    console.error(err)
    return
  }
  console.log(await neatCsv(data))
})

Now you can start doing whatever you need to do with the data, which is formatted as a JavaScript array of objects.

Lessons in this unit:

0:	Introduction
1:	Axios crashes the Node.js process when the request fails
2:	How to set up a cron job that runs a Node.js app
3:	How to get both parsed body and raw body in Express
4:	Interact with the Google Analytics API using Node.js
5:	How to bulk convert file names using Node.js
6:	How to deep copy JavaScript objects using structuredClone
7:	How to handle file uploads in Node.js
8:	How to send an email using nodemailer
9:	Logging all the requests coming through an Express app
10:	How to upload an image to S3 using Node.js
11:	▶︎ How to read a CSV file with Node.js
12:	How to set the current working directory of a Node.js program
13:	How to upload files to S3 from Node.js
14:	How to write a CSV file with Node.js
15:	Where to host a Node.js app
16:	Parsing JSON with Node.js
17:	nodemailer, how to embed an image into an email
18:	The Pug Guide
19:	Restarting a Node process without file changes
20:	How to use Sequelize to interact with PostgreSQL