CSV files are quite common these days owing to the fact that CSV files are simple text and make data transfer between different systems very easy. CSV stands for Comma Separated Values, i.e. the fields are separated by comma, so there exists similar formats where the separator is a different character like tab, or semi-colon. We have seen working with CSV in [THREAD=11157]Perl[/THREAD] & [THREAD=28520]PHP[/THREAD], so why not in Python. Python 2.4 onwards CSV reading and writing was made easier by inclusion on an in-built module csv, the module has reader & writer objects for reading & writing CSV files respectively. Now, let's get our hands dirty with some code. Reading CSV Files First let's look at a very basic example, which will read a CSV file and print out the fields: Code: import csv csv_reader = csv.reader(open("g4eposts.csv", "rb")) for fields in csv_reader: print fields Now, let us look at a scenario where the delimiter is : instead of comma, a good example of such a file is /etc/passwd: Code: import csv ## get the reader object, and specify no quoting csv_reader = csv.reader(open("/etc/passwd", "rb"), delimiter=':', quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONE) for fields in csv_reader: print fields Quoting is required when any field value contains the delimiter character, we'll look at it in the next section. Writing CSV Files A writing example: Code: import csv ## get writer object csv_writer = csv.writer(open('names.csv', 'wb'), quoting=csv.QUOTE_MINIMAL) ## write a few rows csv_writer.writerow(['Tanaz','UK']) csv_writer.writerow(['Navin','IN']) csv_writer.writerow(['Manindar, Shikha','US']) csv_writer.writerow(['Anjali','IN']) Here's the output: Code: Tanaz,UK Navin,IN "Manindar, Shikha",US Anjali,IN As you can see the field value that contained a , was quoted automatically. References http://docs.python.org/library/csv.html
