known services to validate csv file

Question

Are there any good sites/services to validate consistency of CSV file ?

The same as W3C validator but for CSV ?

Thanks!

Answer 1

I recently came across Google Refine - it's not a service for validating CSV files, it's a tool you download locally, but it does provide a lot of tools for working with data and detecting anomalies.

http://code.google.com/p/google-refine/

As mentioned in a reply, "CSV" has become an ill-defined term, principally because people don't follow the One True Way when using delimiter separated data

http://www.catb.org/~esr/writings/taoup/html/ch05s02.html

EDIT/UPDATE (2016-08-09):
CSV Currently Becoming a Well-Defined Term by the W3C CSV Working Group

Answer 2

To validate a CSV file I use the RAINBOW CSV extension in Visual Studio Code and also I open the CSV file in Excel.

Answer 3

The National Archives developed a CSV Schema Language and CSV Validator, software written in Java. It's open source.

Answer 4

The Open Data Institute is developing a CSV validation service that will allow users to check the structure of their data as well as validate it against a simple schema.

The service is still very much in alpha but can be found here:

http://csvlint.io/

The code for the application and the underlying library are both open source:

https://github.com/theodi/csvlint

https://github.com/theodi/csvlint.rb

The README in the library provides a summary of the errors and warnings that can be generated. The following types of error can be reported:

• :wrong_content_type -- content type is not text/csv
• :ragged_rows -- row has a different number of columns (than the first row in the file)
• :blank_rows -- completely empty row, e.g. blank line or a line where all column values are empty
• :invalid_encoding -- encoding error when parsing row, e.g. because of invalid characters
• :not_found -- HTTP 404 error when retrieving the data
• :quoting -- problem with quoting, e.g. missing or stray quote, unclosed quoted field
• :whitespace -- a quoted column has leading or trailing whitespace

The following types of warning can be reported:

• :no_encoding -- the Content-Type header returned in the HTTP request does not have a charset parameter
• :encoding -- the character set is not UTF-8
• :no_content_type -- file is being served without a Content-Type header
• :excel -- no Content-Type header and the file extension is .xls
• :check_options -- CSV file appears to contain only a single column
• :inconsistent_values -- inconsistent values in the same column. Reported if <90% of values seem to have same data type (either numeric or alphanumeric including punctuation)

Answer 5

Toolkit Bay CSV Validator & Linter online, easy to use, set delimiter and go.

Flatfile CSV validator online demo, automatic delimiter detection, upload and go.

Answer 6

CSV Lint at csvlint.com (not .io :) is a service we're building to solve this problem. It checks CSV files against user-defined validation rules / schemas cell by cell.

We spent a lot of time tweaking the UI to allow users to create complex validation rules / schemas easily that meet their business needs without a single line of code.

Our offline validation feature allows users to see the results in-realtime even when validating multiple large size (with millions+ rows) files, and most importantly it 100% protects user data privacy.