wcut is intended to be very similar to the unix command line utility cut, but with words instead.

For example, suppose you have a file (feng-rpkm.txt) with the contents

geneid,gname,rpkm
666666,feng3,9999

With cut, you could run cut -d',' -f2 feng-rpkm.txt to get the gname column. This is easy if you only have a few fields. For a larger number of fields, it gets annoying to count columns. With wcut, you would run

$ wcut -d',' feng-rpkm.txt gname

Similar to cut, the --complement (or -v) flag will return all the columns that do not match:

$ wcut -d',' -v feng-rpkm.txt gname

If you wanted the rpkm and gname column, but in reverse order, you could run

$ wcut -d',' feng-rpkm.txt rpkm gname

See wcut --help for a full list of options.

wcut can be installed from PyPI using pip.

$ pip install wcut

Please report any issues on GitHub.