csv-utility

A simple package to guess the separator and linebreak characters for a "csv" file.

Installation

Node

npm install csv-utility

Bower

bower install csv-utility

Quick start

Node

var csvUtility = require('csv-utility');
var fs = require('fs');
var sample = fs.readFileSync('someFile.csv',{encoding:'utf8'});
var result = csvUtility.guessCSV(sample,{
  linebreak: [';'],
  sep: [':']
});

Browser

var result = csvUtility.guessCSV(sample,{
  linebreak: [';'],
  sep: [':']
});

Functions

csvUtility.guessCSV(sample[,opts])

• sample - a sample string of the raw csv (auto-cropped to 100kb)
• opts (optional) - a configuration to specify additional possible separator or linebreak characters
  • linebreak - the linebreak characters to use OR an array of possible linebreak characters (default: ["\r\n", "\r", "\n"])
  • sep - the separator character to use OR an array of possible separator characters (default: [",", "\t", "|", ";"])
• return
  • linebreak - the most possible linebreak characters
  • sep - the most possible separator characters

csvUtility.guessLinebreak(sample[,opts])

• sample - a sample string of the raw csv (auto-cropped to 100kb)
• opts (optional) - an array of possible linebreak characters (default: ["\r\n", "\r", "\n"])
• return - the most possible linebreak characters

csvUtility.guessSeparator(sample,[linebreak,opts])

• sample - a sample string of the raw csv (auto-cropped to 100kb)
• linebreak - the linebreak character to use (default: "\n")
• opts (optional) - an array of possible separator characters (default: [",", "\t", "|", ";"])
• return - the most possible separator characters

History

1.0.0 Initial release 1.0.1 BUGFIX: Corrected the documentation for csvUtility.guessSeparator. 1.0.2 BUGFIX: Forgot to push the changes for the codes. 1.0.3 BUGFIX: Fixed bug at parsing non-array inputs. 1.0.4 UPDATE: Modified the error weights for the separator detection, to reduce noise from low frequency separator characters.