Arguments common to all tools

All tools which accept CSV as input share a set of common command-line arguments:

-d DELIMITER, --delimiter DELIMITER
                      Delimiting character of the input CSV file.
-t, --tabs            Specifies that the input CSV file is delimited with
                      tabs. Overrides "-d".
-q QUOTECHAR, --quotechar QUOTECHAR
                      Character used to quote strings in the input CSV file.
-u {0,1,2,3}, --quoting {0,1,2,3}
                      Quoting style used in the input CSV file. 0 = Quote
                      Minimal, 1 = Quote All, 2 = Quote Non-numeric, 3 =
                      Quote None.
-b, --no-doublequote  Whether or not double quotes are doubled in the input
                      CSV file.
-p ESCAPECHAR, --escapechar ESCAPECHAR
                      Character used to escape the delimiter if --quoting 3
                      ("Quote None") is specified and to escape the
                      QUOTECHAR if --no-doublequote is not specified.
-z MAXFIELDSIZE, --maxfieldsize MAXFIELDSIZE
                      Maximum length of a single field in the input CSV
                      file.
-e ENCODING, --encoding ENCODING
                      Specify the encoding the input CSV file.
-S, --skipinitialspace
                      Ignore whitespace immediately following the delimiter.
-H, --no-header-row   Specifies that the input CSV file has no header row.
                      Will create default headers (A,B,C,...).
-v, --verbose         Print detailed tracebacks when errors occur.
-l, --linenumbers     Insert a column of line numbers at the front of the
                      output. Useful when piping to grep or as a simple
                      primary key.
--zero                When interpreting or displaying column numbers, use
                      zero-based numbering instead of the default 1-based
                      numbering.

These arguments may be used to override csvkit’s default “smart” parsing of CSV files. This is frequently necessary if the input file uses a particularly unusual style of quoting or is an encoding that is not compatible with utf-8. Not every command is supported by every tool, but the majority of them are.

Note that the output of csvkit’s tools is always formatted with “default” formatting options. This means that when executing multiple csvkit commands (either with a pipe or via intermediary files) it is only ever necessary to specify formatting arguments the first time. (And doing so for subsequent commands will likely cause them to fail.)