in reply to Re^2: CSV headers. Feedback wanted
in thread CSV headers. Feedback wanted

First, I agree that guessing separators in a weird situation is too risky. Also, I think that detecting the presence of multiple possible separators and throwing an error makes sense.

Yes, I know that the data resulting from choosing the wrong separator should look weird, but a person might not realize what they are seeing. Throwing an error when an easily detectable "weirdness" is seen will help alert the user to the situation.

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Re^4: CSV headers. Feedback wanted
by bitingduck (Deacon) on Feb 14, 2016 at 16:18 UTC

    Your point about looking weird to the reader reminds me of one incident that I forgot about that happened with the files. There's a notes field that happens to be too small to see much of anything, and one user put in a note that accidentally embedded a linefeed rather than entering the note due to differences in "return" vs "enter" behavior of Labview. It confused people for about a day until they got someone to put in a thumb drive at the source and extract a copy of the original data (most users didn't have much understanding of the data flow). So I'd definitely prefer a way to throw an error or warning for multiple separators.