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neanderslob
Asked: 2015-05-29 23:52:03 +0800 CST

Examining EOL characters in a CSV

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I have a csv file that I'm intending to import into a mysql table. I would therefore like to make sure I'm reporting it's LINES TERMINATED BY properly. However I cannot figure out what characters are terminating the lines in this csv.

I'd guess that it's terminated by \n (the standard Unix EOL). How can I determine this for sure?

I've tried

  • cat -v file.csv
  • file file.csv

I've also tried using vim and :set list which just showed the location of line breaks with $

Any suggestions would be appreciated

command-line

3 Answers

  1. You can create a hex-dump of your file with xxd which is part of the vim-common package.

    xxd file.csv | less

    Then check the line endings:

    • 0a => \n
    • 0d => \r
    • 0d0a => \r\n
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  2. You can use the file to give you an indication of the type of line endings.

    Unix:

    $ file file1.txt
file1.txt: ASCII text

    DOS:

    $ file file2.txt
file2.txt: ASCII text, with CRLF line terminators

    and knowing that DOS uses carriage return and line feed ("\r\n") as a line ending, which Unix uses just line feed ("\n").

    So you can determine what is EOL of any file you want.

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  3. Instead of CHECKING, why not simply SET the line ending style you prefer:

    sudo apt-get dos2unix will give you access to dos2unix and unix2dos command line utilities.

    These will convert text files according to the names.

    Caveat: files with mixed content has been troublesome, I'm not updated on whether that problem is gone.

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