Programmer - Linux Tool To Parse CSV files

Programmer Question

Is anyone aware of a bash command that can be used to parse CSV files?

To do things like:

csvparse -c 2,5,6 filename

to extract fields from columns 2 5 and 6 from all rows.

It should be able to handle the csv file format: http://tools.ietf.org/html/rfc4180 which means quoting fields and escaping inner quotes as appropriate, so for an example row with 3 fields:

field1,"field, number ""2"", has inner
quotes and a comma",field3

so that if I request field 2 for the row above I get:

field, number "2", has inner quotes
and a comma

I appreciate that there are numerous solutions, perl, awk (etc..) to this problem but I would like a native bash command line tool that does not require me to invoke some other scripting environment or write any additional code (!).

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