CSV

What This Skill Does

The CSV skill for OpenClaw provides robust, RFC 4180 compliant parsing and generation for comma-separated values and related delimited files. It acts as a bridge between inconsistent data sources, ensuring that your data maintains integrity when moving between legacy systems, modern APIs, and spreadsheet applications. It intelligently handles complex scenarios such as multiline records, embedded quotes, and international delimiter variations like semicolons or tabs, preventing common corruption issues associated with naive CSV parsing.

Installation

To integrate this skill into your environment, use the OpenClaw CLI or your workspace interface: clawhub install openclaw/skills/skills/ivangdavila/csv

Use Cases

• Data Standardization: Convert messy, manually edited spreadsheets into strict RFC 4180 compliant files for database ingestion.
• Excel Compatibility: Automatically apply UTF-8 BOM encoding and prevent formula injection by neutralizing dangerous characters in numeric fields.
• System Migration: Transform semicolon-separated European Excel exports into standard comma-separated files or TSVs for cross-platform interoperability.
• Data Integrity: Validate column counts across rows to ensure that missing data or truncated files are identified before processing begins.

Example Prompts

1. "Parse the uploaded inventory.csv file, detect the delimiter automatically, and verify that every row contains exactly 5 columns, flagging any discrepancies."
2. "Generate a CSV file from this JSON data, ensuring that all numeric strings starting with leading zeros are properly quoted to preserve formatting for Excel."
3. "Convert this semicolon-separated data file to a standard comma-separated format, and ensure all lines with embedded newlines are handled correctly according to RFC 4180."

Tips & Limitations

When working with data containing numbers, be mindful of the 15-digit precision limit in Excel; always quote such identifiers if they are meant to be treated as unique keys rather than mathematical values. For security, the skill applies standard sanitization to prevent formula injection when inputs start with characters like '=' or '@'. Note that the tool prioritizes strict compliance, which means it may reject malformed files that have unescaped quotes or mismatched column counts, which is intentional to ensure data pipeline reliability. Always specify the character encoding if your source is non-UTF-8 to avoid garbled characters in processed output files.