CSV preview in Positron doesn’t treat first row as column headers

[darh78]

Hi team, and thanks for this great project — I’m currently exploring Positron and ran into something I wanted to clarify or suggest.

When I open a CSV file by clicking on it in the Files pane, the table preview shows generic column names like column01, column02, etc., and what appears to be the actual header row is treated as row 0 in the preview (see image attached).

Here’s what I observed:
• The CSV file is correctly formatted (i.e., the first line contains valid column headers).
• When I click “Open as Plain Text File”, I can confirm the header line is present and well-formed.
• Loading the file into R via read.csv("teamcolors.csv", header = TRUE) works fine — column names are assigned correctly.

So this behavior seems limited to the built-in viewer.

Would it be possible to add an option to treat the first row as a header when displaying CSVs in the preview pane?
Or perhaps auto-detect this based on common patterns (like a line of quoted strings)?

Here's my session info:

Positron Version: 2025.07.0 build 204
Code - OSS Version: 1.100.3
Commit: 03ae7a5393c776bb24c23d2aa6a6bfbba90cbc5e
Date: 2025-06-30T16:29:03.492Z
Electron: 34.5.1
Chromium: 132.0.6834.210
Node.js: 20.19.0
V8: 13.2.152.41-electron.0
OS: Darwin arm64 24.6.0

Thanks in advance, and great work again on Positron!

[juliasilge]

We might need more info on what is going on in the specific CSV where you are observing this. For various example CSVs I have, I see the first row correctly identified as the column names:

[darh78]

Hello @juliasilge,

Thanks for the reply.
Here the "Plain text File" view when clicking in the button in the view pane.

I also attach another example with the same issue:

and the plain text view:

I also attach both csv files.

teamcolors.csv
TeamsFranchises.csv

[juliasilge]

Ah interesting, I notice that both of these have no column header/name for the first column! Thank you for sharing those examples. I have opened #8860 to track and prioritize a fix for this special situation.

[darh78]

Thanks very much @juliasilge