Guess Delimited File Parameters — peek_guess

Guess the delimiter, quote character and decimal mark of a delimited text file. The function splits each of the first n lines by each candidate delimiter and selects the delimiter that produces the most consistent number of fields.

The algorithm is adapted from the vroom package.

Usage

peek_guess_delim(
  path,
  delims = c(",", "\t", " ", "|", ":", ";"),
  quotes = c("\"", "'"),
  n = 1024
)

Arguments

path: path to the text file.
delims: character vector of candidate delimiters.
quotes: character vector of candidate quote characters.
n: number of lines to read for guessing (default 1024).

Value

a named list with elements:

delim: the guessed delimiter character (or NULL)
quote: the guessed quote character (or NULL)
decimal_mark: the guessed decimal mark (or NULL)

Examples

f <- system.file(package = "fpeek",
  "datafiles", "test-comma.csv")
peek_guess_delim(f)
#> $delim
#> [1] ","
#> 
#> $quote
#> [1] "\""
#> 
#> $decimal_mark
#> [1] "."
#> 

f <- system.file(package = "fpeek",
  "datafiles", "test-semicolon.csv")
peek_guess_delim(f)
#> $delim
#> [1] ";"
#> 
#> $quote
#> [1] "\""
#> 
#> $decimal_mark
#> [1] ","
#>