9 December 2015

Using PHP to read csv file is a common thing to do. Sadly there is no solid standard on delimiters, depends on fully from where you get your csv file. Usually simple csv exports are a bit different than what you get from xls to csv conversion. So I wrote a little function that detects csv delimiters of cells / fields. It counts predefined delimiter possibilites from the first row. Assumes that the highest occurred possible delimiter is the delimiter.

Source code viewer
  1. /**
  2.  * Detect delimiter of cells.
  3.  *
  4.  * @param string $name
  5.  *   CSV file path.
  6.  *
  7.  * @return array
  8.  *   Return detected delimiter.
  9.  */
  10. function detect_delimiter($name) {
  11.   $delimiters = array(
  12.     ';' => 0,
  13.     ',' => 0,
  14.   );
  15.  
  16.   $handle = fopen($name, 'r');
  17.   $first_line = fgets($handle);
  18.   fclose($handle);
  19.   foreach ($delimiters as $delimiter => &$count) {
  20.     $count = count(str_getcsv($first_line, $delimiter));
  21.   }
  22.  
  23.   return array_search(max($delimiters), $delimiters);
  24. }
Programming Language: PHP