The use-case in which I got to see a lot of CSVs was in a data importing tool. Personally, I think that everyone should just use UTF-8. But since a lot of peopl

The use-case in which I got to see a lot of CSVs was in a data importing tool. Personally, I think that everyone should just use UTF-8. But since a lot of people don't do that, we were forced to try guessing the encoding while providing a preview, along with a way to try manually try other encodings. I think the only other time I've seen something that hacky has been with a date parser that would try to guess the format for you. That pushed me to the firm belief that ISO8601 is the only sensible way to store dates.