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Odd csv column-name truncation with only one column

Tim Chase python.list at tim.thechases.com
Thu Jul 19 14:01:37 EDT 2012 
On 07/19/12 08:52, Hans Mulder wrote:
> Perhaps it should be documented that the Sniffer doesn't work
> on single-column data.

I think this would  involve the least change in existing code, and
go a long way towards removing my surprise.  :-)

> If you really need to read a one-column csv file, you'll have
> to find some other way to produce a Dialect object.  Perhaps the
> predefined 'cvs.excel' dialect matches your data.  If not, the
> easiest way might be to manually define a csv.Dialect subclass.

The problem I'm trying to solve is "here's a filename that might be
comma/pipe/tab delimited, it has an 'email' column at minimum, and
perhaps a couple others of interest if they were included"  It's
improbable that it's ONLY an email column, but my tests happened to
snag this edge case.  I can likely do my own sniffing by reading the
first line, checking for tabs then pipes then commas (perhaps
biasing the order based on the file-extension of .csv vs. .txt), and
then building my own dialect information to pass to csv.DictReader
 It just seems unfortunate that the sniffer would ever consider
[a-zA-Z0-9] as a valid delimiter.

-tkc
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