Auto-detect the delimiter in a CSV file using pd.read_csv

Question

Is there a way for read_csv to auto-detect the delimiter? numpy's genfromtxt does this.

My files have data with single space, double space and a tab as delimiters. genfromtxt() solves it, but is slower than pandas' read_csv.

Any ideas?

Answer 1

Option 1

Using delim_whitespace=True

df = pd.read_csv('file.csv', delim_whitespace=True)

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Option 2

Pass a regular expression to the sep parameter:

df = pd.read_csv('file.csv', sep='\s+')

This is equivalent to the first option

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Documentation for pd.read_csv.