Unstructured-IO / Unstructured-IO/unstructured

partition_csv() raises UnicodeDecodeError on UTF-16-LE files even with correct encoding argument

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Description

Describe the bug

Delimiter sniffing in partition_csv() decodes its sample line-by-line (unstructured/partition/csv.py, _CsvPartitioningContext.delimiter). readlines() splits the raw bytes on 0x0A, which in UTF-16 lands in the middle of a code unit, and only the first fragment carries the BOM. For UTF-16-LE — what str.encode("utf-16") and Excel's "Unicode Text" export produce — the first fragment is odd-length and decoding raises UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-16-le' codec can't decode byte 0x0a ... truncated data, even though the caller passed the correct encoding and pd.read_csv handles the same bytes fine.

UTF-16-BE doesn't raise, but silently decodes every line after the first as mojibake, so the sniffer sees corrupted data. (The existing stanley-cups-utf-16.csv example doc is BE, which is why tests never hit this.)

To Reproduce

import io
from unstructured.partition.csv import partition_csv

data = "name,age\nAlice,30\nBob,25\n".encode("utf-16")
partition_csv(file=io.BytesIO(data), encoding="utf-16")
# UnicodeDecodeError: 'utf-16-le' codec can't decode byte 0x0a in position 18: truncated data

Fails identically with filename=. pd.read_csv(io.BytesIO(data), encoding="utf-16") parses the same bytes correctly.

Expected behavior

The file partitions successfully when the correct encoding is supplied (and delimiter sniffing sees correctly decoded text for both UTF-16 variants).

Environment

unstructured 0.26.3, Python 3.11, reproduced on current main.

I have a fix ready and will open a PR.

Contributor guide

Open the contributing guide

First steps

  1. Read the whole issue, then the project's contributing guide.
  2. Comment on the issue to say you are picking it up — it saves two people doing the same work.
  3. Fork the repository and make your change on a branch.
  4. Open a pull request that references the issue number.

Research direction

Start in unstructured/partition/csv.py at _CsvPartitioningContext.delimiter and reproduce the UTF-16-LE example with partition_csv. Check the delimiter-sniffing path against pd.read_csv behavior for both UTF-16 variants; done means correct decoding and successful partitioning when encoding is supplied, with regression coverage for the reported failure.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Assessment

Tech stack
pandas, python
Domain
backend, data
Issue type
Bug
Difficulty
3/5
Estimated time
1-2 days
Activity status
Quiet
Clarity
Clearly specified
Newbie friendliness
35/100

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