CSV Fingerprints by Victor Powell.
From the post:
CSV is a simple and common format for tabular data that uses commas to separate rows and columns. Nearly every spreadsheet and database program lets users import from and export to CSV. But until recently, these programs varied in how they treated special cases, like when the data itself has a comma in it.
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It’s easy to make a mistake when you try to make a CSV file fit a particular format. To make it easier to spot mistakes, I’ve made a “CSV Fingerprint” viewer (named after the “Fashion Fingerprints” from The New York Times’s “Front Row to Fashion Week” interactive ). The idea is to provide a birdseye view of the file without too much distracting detail. The idea is similar to Tufte’s Image Quilts…a qualitative view, as opposed to a rendering of the data in the file themselves. In this sense, the CSV Fingerprint is a sort of meta visualization.
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This is very clever. Not only can you test a CSV snippet on the webpage, but the source code is on Github. https://github.com/setosa/csv-fingerprint (source code)
Of course, it does rely on the most powerful image processing system known to date. Err, that would be you. 😉
Pass this along. I can imagine any number of data miners who will be glad you did.