detect_delimiter

About

Detects the delimiter used in CSV, TSV and other ad hoc file formats.

Installation

Use pip install detect_delimiter

Usage

detect_delimiter exposes the detect() functinon, which takes a str as input and returns a delimiter.

>>> from detect_delimiter import detect
>>> detect("looks|like|the vertical bar\n is|the|delimiter\n")
'|'

When detect() doesn't know, it returns None:

>>> text = "not really any delimiters in here.\nthis is just text.\n"
>>> detect()

It's possible to provide a default, which will be used in that case:

>>> detect(text, default=',')
','

By default, detect() will prevent avoid checking alpha-numeric characters and the period/full stop character ("."). This can be adjusted via the blacklist parameter.

If you believe that you know the delimiter, it's possible to provide a list of possible delimiters to check for via the whitelist parameter. If you don't provide a value, [',', ';', ':', '|', '\t'] will be checked.

Testing

You can either use pytest or tox directly from the project's root directory.