Why Your CSV-to-JSON Pipeline Needs More Than a One-Line Script

I maintain a data pipeline that ingests CSV files from three different vendors and converts them to JSON for processing. Each vendor has different quoting conventions, different encodings, and different ideas about what constitutes a valid CSV. A one-line conversion script lasted exactly one day before the edge cases started rolling in. If you are converting CSV to JSON in production, you need to handle more than just comma splitting. The vendor problem Vendor A sends UTF-8 CSV files with proper RFC 4180 quoting. Vendor B sends Windows-1252 encoded files with semicolons as delimiters (common in European locales). Vendor C sends tab-delimited files with a .csv extension and no quoting whatsoever. All three arrive as "CSV files." Your converter needs to handle all three or produce garbage output for two of them. Detection strategies: Encoding detection : Read the first few bytes. A BOM (byte order mark) identifies UTF-8 (EF BB BF), UTF-16 LE (FF FE), or UTF-16 BE (FE FF). Without a BOM,