[BUG] CSVLoader misparses headers in UTF-8 CSV files with a BOM

Description

CSVLoader passes a leading UTF-8 BOM (U+FEFF) to csv.DictReader. For an ordinary header, the BOM becomes part of the first column name. When the first header is quoted and contains a comma, it also prevents quote recognition: a two-column CSV is parsed as three columns and row values are assigned to the wrong headers.

Reproduced on main at 66ef97c73e5459059274c5117e48e2e5ba50a871 with both inline text and a local UTF-8-with-BOM file. No LLM or API key is needed.

Steps to Reproduce

Run this against the current workspace:

from crewai_tools.rag.loaders.csv_loader import CSVLoader
from crewai_tools.rag.source_content import SourceContent

csv_text = '\ufeff"last, first",age\n"Doe, Jane",30\n'
result = CSVLoader().load(SourceContent(csv_text))
print(repr(result.metadata["columns"]))
print(result.content)

The same result occurs when writing this text to a file with UTF-8 encoding and loading that path.

Expected behavior

The columns should be ["last, first", "age"], and the row should contain last, first: Doe, Jane | age: 30, just as it does without the leading BOM.

Screenshots/Code snippets

Actual columns:

['\ufeff"last', ' first"', 'age']

The value 30 is assigned to the spurious first" header rather than age. An unquoted name,age header instead produces ["\ufeffname", "age"].

Operating System

Other (specify in additional context)

Python Version

3.12

crewAI Version

1.15.21 (main @ 66ef97c)

crewAI Tools Version

1.15.21 (main @ 66ef97c)

Virtual Environment

Venv

Evidence

In lib/crewai-tools/src/crewai_tools/rag/loaders/csv_loader.py, _load_from_file decodes using UTF-8 and _parse_csv directly passes StringIO(content) to csv.DictReader. The leading U+FEFF is therefore preserved before the opening quote. Removing only that prefix makes the same input parse correctly.

Possible Solution

Remove one leading U+FEFF in _parse_csv before creating csv.DictReader, so file, inline-text and URL inputs share the same normalization. Add regression coverage for quoted/unquoted headers with and without a BOM, and preserve U+FEFF inside field values.

Additional context

AI-assisted contribution: this report and the accompanying fix were prepared with Codex. Per CONTRIBUTING.md, please apply the llm-generated label; the issue form does not expose a label editor for this account.

Duplicate check: searched this repository for CSVLoader, BOM and utf-8-sig, and checked the open PR titles and descriptions. No matching CSVLoader fix was found.

Local reproduction: macOS 26.6.2, Python 3.12.13. The regression suite also reproduces the issue on Python 3.13.13: 7 BOM cases fail before the fix, while 16 cases pass.