Data sharing and research collaboration is hindered when messy data is released. Despite this, it still exists. detect-delimiter aims to provide tools with an option for inspecting the header of a text file and checking the actual delimiter used, rather than blindly believing the file extension. Usage The detect_delimiter module 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.

This Python package can also be installed via "pip": "pip install detect-delimiter".