peek_guess_delim: Guess Delimited File Parameters

In fpeek: Check Text Files Content at a Glance

Guess Delimited File Parameters

Description

Guess the delimiter, quote character and decimal mark of a delimited text file. The function splits each of the first n lines by each candidate delimiter and selects the delimiter that produces the most consistent number of fields.

The algorithm is adapted from the vroom package.

Usage

peek_guess_delim(
  path,
  delims = c(",", "\t", " ", "|", ":", ";"),
  quotes = c("\"", "'"),
  n = 1024
)

Arguments

path	path to the text file.
delims	character vector of candidate delimiters.
quotes	character vector of candidate quote characters.
n	number of lines to read for guessing (default 1024).

Value

a named list with elements:

delim

the guessed delimiter character (or NULL)

quote

the guessed quote character (or NULL)

decimal_mark

the guessed decimal mark (or NULL)

Examples

f <- system.file(package = "fpeek",
  "datafiles", "test-comma.csv")
peek_guess_delim(f)

f <- system.file(package = "fpeek",
  "datafiles", "test-semicolon.csv")
peek_guess_delim(f)

fpeek documentation built on April 2, 2026, 5:07 p.m.