How to guess the field separator in a table

Posted by Bob_Mesibov on Oct 4, 2019 1:56 AM
By BASHing data
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So I download the table "blahblahblah.csv" for data auditing. Muttering a quick prayer to MIME, the goddess of file formats, I open the table. Yes! Despite the ".csv" filename suffix, the table is actually tab-separated, not comma-separated. Once again I've escaped the dreaded Curse of the CSV Monster. But did I have to actually open the file to check the format?

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