Data Cleaning Exercises

Glossary

Delimiter and quoting

The character that separates fields (comma, semicolon, tab) and the quotes that protect separators inside a value.

A value such as "Smith, Jane" contains the delimiter and must be quoted. European exports often use semicolons because the comma is the decimal separator. Let a real CSV parser handle quotes; splitting lines on commas breaks rows.

Related: Character encoding, Locale