Loading CSV files

CSV files are ubiquitous in the world of analytical data, which is why DuckDB comes with a powerful and flexible built-in CSV parser. The appeal of this simple text-based format is that CSV files are easy to inspect, and their tabular format is readily comprehended. While they are straightforward to produce and share, there are, however, often challenges when working with CSV files. Notably, they come in a wide variety of dialects and, often, non-standard variations. For example, despite their name, they sometimes use characters other than commas for delimiting each field—such as tabs, they may or may not have a header row with column names, and there are different approaches to escaping special characters, such as delimiters and quotes. When parsing a CSV file, the specific format of a CSV file can often be inferred but may need to be specified manually. Furthermore, CSV files don’t contain an embedded schema, meaning that conversion from text values...