============================= Arguments common to all tools ============================= csvkit's tools share a set of common command-line arguments. Not every argument is supported by every tool, so please check which are supported by the tool you are using with the :code:`--help` flag: .. code-block:: none -d DELIMITER, --delimiter DELIMITER Delimiting character of the input CSV file. -t, --tabs Specify 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 specified. -z FIELD_SIZE_LIMIT, --maxfieldsize FIELD_SIZE_LIMIT Maximum length of a single field in the input CSV file. -e ENCODING, --encoding ENCODING Specify the encoding of the input CSV file. -L LOCALE, --locale LOCALE Specify the locale (en_US) of any formatted numbers. -S, --skipinitialspace Ignore whitespace immediately following the delimiter. --blanks Do not convert "", "na", "n/a", "none", "null", "." to NULL. --null-value NULL_VALUES [NULL_VALUES ...] Convert this value to NULL. --null-value can be specified multiple times. --date-format DATE_FORMAT Specify a strptime date format string like "%m/%d/%Y". --datetime-format DATETIME_FORMAT Specify a strptime datetime format string like "%m/%d/%Y %I:%M %p". --no-leading-zeroes Do not convert a numeric value with leading zeroes to a number. -H, --no-header-row Specify that the input CSV file has no header row. Will create default headers (a,b,c,...). -K SKIP_LINES, --skip-lines SKIP_LINES Specify the number of initial lines to skip before the header row (e.g. comments, copyright notices, empty rows). -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. -V, --version Display version information and exit. These arguments can be used to override csvkit's default "smart" parsing of CSV files. This may be necessary, for example, if the input file uses a particularly unusual quoting style or has an encoding that is incompatible with UTF-8. For example, to disable CSV sniffing, set :code:`--snifflimit 0` and then, if necessary, set the :code:`--delimiter` and :code:`--quotechar` options yourself. Or, set :code:`--snifflimit -1` to use the entire file as the sample, instead of the first 1024 bytes. To disable type inference, add the :code:`--no-inference` flag. To prevent text values from being converted to dates or datetimes, set the :code:`--date-format` and/or :code:`--datetime-format` options to a non-occurring value, like ``-``. 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 through intermediary files) it is only ever necessary to specify these arguments the first time (and doing so for subsequent commands will likely cause them to fail). See the documentation of :doc:`/scripts/csvclean` for a description of the default formatting options. .. note:: The ``--encoding`` option has no effect if reading from standard input. Set the ``PYTHONIOENCODING`` environment variable instead. .. seealso:: For a list of possible values for the ``--encoding`` option, see the `Python documentation `__.