How to programmatically guess whether a CSV file is comma or semicolon delimited

Question

In most cases, CSV files are text files with records delimited by commas. However, sometimes these files will come semicolon delimited. (Excel will use semicolon delimiter

Answer 1

Let's say you have the following in your csv:

title,url,date,copyright,hdurl,explanation,media_type,service_version

then you can use python's in-built CSV module as follows:

import csv
data = "title,url,date,copyright,hdurl,explanation,media_type,service_version"
sn = csv.Sniffer()
delimiter = sn.sniff(data).delimiter

Printing the variable named delimiter will return ',' and this is the delimiter here. You can test by using some different delimiters.