Question 247610 in Visual Studio Code Question posted in
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Visual Studio Code – How to find line break style (CRLF, CR or LF) in a CSV-file using Mac

I need to find what type of line break that is used in a csv file, using Mac. I have exported a data set from SPSS (a statistical software) to a CSV-file. This CSV-file will be sent to be run through a register and I need to provide information regarding the file, such as which line break-style that is used in the file.

As I open the CSV-file in TextEdit on my Mac I see no symbols corresponding to line break (does not say rn, r or n. There is simply a new row with no symbol indicating line break. I have not been able to find what’s used as default in SPSS or how to customize this. I tried by running the file through the Terminal-app and Visual studio code (what I had access to) but no symbols indicating line break. Does anyone know how to determine which line break-style that is used in the CSV-file in this case?

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2

Answers


  1. 0

    You can open the file in Visual Studio using the Binary editor. You will see all characters.

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  2. 0

    According the RFC 4180, CRLF is the standard record delimiter for CSVs, but LF is also frequently used. Forget about CR-delimited records as that kind of CSV probably doesn’t exist anymore.

    Here’s a solution that works in most cases:

    awk '{print (/r$/ ? "CRLF" : "LF"); exit}' file.csv

    The problem with the previous approach is that a CSV record can span multiple lines, so encountering a LF doesn’t guaranty that you got to the end of the record. A workaround would be to go to the end of the file and check how it is terminated.

    You can use perl for that:

    perl -le '
    open(F, '<', $ARGV[0]) or die $!."n";
    seek(F, -2, 2);
    read(F, $e, 2);
    close(F);
    if("rn" eq $e) {print "CRLF"}
    elsif("n" eq ($e = substr($e, -1))) {print "LF"}
    elsif($e eq "r") {print "CR"}
' file.csv
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