Detect delimiter in data file

[pomchip]

Hi

Are you aware of any function that would help automatically detect the delimiter/separator used in a ASCII data file?

Thanks

[DavoWW]

Hi @pomchip,
The function data.table::fread() tries to automatically determine the separator used in a delimited file. The arguments sep= and sep2= give you some extra control.

Otherwise, you could write a function to read the file line-by-line using readLines() and then do character frequency analysis to see which is most likely to be the separator (especially if it is equally common on every line).

HTH

[pomchip]

Thanks DavoWW. That gives me a place to start.

Ideally I would like to find the magic function that would return only the value of the separator when called.

I am not looking for processing the data file with data.table, but I can trying to replicate the approach this package takes.