Skip to main content

Data File Formats

Metacrafter reads files through iterabledata. Format detection is automatic from the file extension. For compressed files, both the codec and the underlying format are detected (for example data.csv.gz is gzip-compressed CSV).

Text formats

FormatExtensionsNotes
CSV.csv--delimiter overrides auto-detection
TSV.tsvUse --delimiter '\t' if needed
JSON.jsonArray of objects
JSON Lines.jsonl, .ndjsonNewline-delimited JSON
XML.xml--tagname selects the record element

Binary formats

FormatExtensions
BSON.bson
Parquet.parquet
Avro.avro
ORC.orc
Excel.xls, .xlsx
Pickle.pickle, .pkl

Compression codecs

These suffixes (and --compression) are recognized: gzip (.gz), bzip2 (.bz2), xz (.xz), lz4 (.lz4), zstandard (.zst), Brotli (.br), Snappy, ZIP (.zip).

--encoding selects character encoding for text formats (default: auto-detected). --compression auto is the default; none disables codec handling.