how to find out if csv file fields are tab delimited or comma delimited

Question

how to find out if csv file fields are tab delimited or comma delimited. I need php validation for this. Can anyone plz help. Thanks in advance.

Answer 1

I'm just counting the occurrences of the different delimiters in the CSV file, the one with the most should probably be the correct delimiter:

//The delimiters array to look through
$delimiters = array(
    'semicolon' => ";",
    'tab'       => "\t",
    'comma'     => ",",
);

//Load the csv file into a string
$csv = file_get_contents($file);
foreach ($delimiters as $key => $delim) {
    $res[$key] = substr_count($csv, $delim);
}

//reverse sort the values, so the [0] element has the most occured delimiter
arsort($res);

reset($res);
$first_key = key($res);

return $delimiters[$first_key];