Characters have to be decoded before CSV rules apply

UTF-8 is the modern default, but business exports still arrive as Windows-1252, Latin-1, UTF-16 and other encodings. A byte order mark (BOM) can identify some variants, while other files require detection plus human confirmation.

UTF-8 without BOM

Common, portable and not always self-identifying. Validate the bytes.

UTF-8 with BOM

The leading marker helps some tools recognize encoding but may surprise others.

Legacy code pages

The same byte can represent different characters. Names and symbols reveal mistakes quickly.

A comma inside quotes is data, not a new column

CSV commonly uses commas, but semicolons, tabs and pipes are ordinary in exports. The quote and escape rules determine whether delimiters, quotes and newlines can live inside a field.

customer_id,name,note
001284,"Doe, Jane","line one
line two"
001285,"O""Brien","ready"

A parser that counts physical lines or splits blindly on commas will misread this valid data.

Record boundaries and first-row meaning are part of the contract

LF, CRLF and older CR line endings can appear across platforms. A first row may contain field names, or simply be the first record. Both choices affect every later operation, so they should remain visible.

Confirm the parse before changing the data

Detect, then display.Show encoding, delimiter, quote/escape, newline and header assumptions together.
Report confidence and anomalies.A dominant delimiter is not proof when some rows have a different width.
Let the user override.Update the preview immediately when a parser setting changes.
Preserve the contract.Save approved settings with recurring workflows instead of guessing again next month.
Separate input and output.Changing encoding or dialect is a transformation that should be previewed and counted.

Useful inference, visible all the way through

CSVProof detects a likely parser contract, shows the evidence and keeps every setting adjustable. Once approved, that contract travels with the recipe and run report.

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