How to Escape Tab Separators in Logstash?

Better Stack Team
Updated on April 5, 2024

To correctly process CSV data that uses tab characters as separators in Logstash, it's necessary to configure the Logstash CSV filter to recognize the tab separators.

Suppose you're reading CSV data as shown below:

 
input {
    file {
        path => "/var/data/*.csv"
        type => "test_data"
        start_position => "beginning"
    }
}

In this case, indicate the tab separator with the real tab character:

 
filter {
   csv {
    separator => "  "  # <-- Real tab character used here
   }
}

It's important to note that employing the \t sequence will not yield the expected results:

 
filter {
   csv {
    separator => "\t"  # <-- This does not parse as intended
   }
}

To further your understanding of Logstash, explore our comprehensive guide.

Got an article suggestion? Let us know
Explore more
Licensed under CC-BY-NC-SA

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 4.0 International License.

Make your mark

Join the writer's program

Are you a developer and love writing and sharing your knowledge with the world? Join our guest writing program and get paid for writing amazing technical guides. We'll get them to the right readers that will appreciate them.

Write for us
Writer of the month
Marin Bezhanov
Marin is a software engineer and architect with a broad range of experience working...
Build on top of Better Stack

Write a script, app or project on top of Better Stack and share it with the world. Make a public repository and share it with us at our email.

community@betterstack.com

or submit a pull request and help us build better products for everyone.

See the full list of amazing projects on github