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Arguments common to all utilities
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Description
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All utilities which accept CSV as input share a set of common command-line arguments::

  -d DELIMITER, --delimiter DELIMITER
                        Delimiting character of the input CSV file.
  -t, --tabs            Specifies that the input CSV file is delimited with
                        tabs. Overrides "-d".
  -q QUOTECHAR, --quotechar QUOTECHAR
                        Character used to quote strings in the input CSV file.
  -u {0,1,2,3}, --quoting {0,1,2,3}
                        Quoting style used in the input CSV file. 0 = Quote
                        Minimal, 1 = Quote All, 2 = Quote Non-numeric, 3 =
                        Quote None.
  -b, --doublequote     Whether or not double quotes are doubled in the input
                        CSV file.
  -p` ESCAPECHAR, --escapechar ESCAPECHAR
                        Character used to escape the delimiter if quoting is
                        set to "Quote None" and the quotechar if doublequote
                        is not specified.
  -z MAXFIELDSIZE, --maxfieldsize MAXFIELDSIZE
                        Maximum length of a single field in the input CSV
                        file.
  -e ENCODING, --encoding ENCODING
  -v, --verbose         Print detailed tracebacks when errors occur.
                        Specify the encoding the input file.
  -l, --linenumbers     Insert a column of line numbers at the front of the
                        output. Useful when piping to grep or as a simple
                        primary key.

These arguments may be used to override csvkit's default "smart" parsing of CSV files.  This is frequently necessary if the input file uses a particularly unusual style of quoting or is an encoding that is not compatible with utf-8.

Note that the output of csvkit's utilities is always formatted with "default" formatting options. This means that when executing multiple csvkit commands (either with a pipe or via intermediary files) it is only ever necessary to specify formatting arguments the first time. (And doing so for subsequent commands will likely cause them to fail.)

Examples
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Convert the 2000 census geo headers file from fixed-width to CSV and from latin-1 encoding to utf8::

    $ in2csv -e iso-8859-1 -f fixed -s examples/realdata/census_2000/census2000_geo_schema.csv examples/realdata/census_2000/usgeo_excerpt.upl > usgeo.csv

Add line numbers to a file, making no other changes::

    $ csvcut -l examples/realdata/FY09_EDU_Recipients_by_State.csv