Question

I am completely new to python and struggling to make a simple thing work.

I am reading a bunch of information from a Web service, parsing the results, and I want to write it out into a flat-file. Most of my items are single line items, but one of the things I get back from my Web service is a paragraph. The paragraph will contain newlines, quotes, and any random characters.

I was going to use the CSV module for python, but unsure of the parameters I should use and how to escape my string so the paragraph gets put onto a single line and so I am guaranteed all characters are properly escaped (especially the delimiter)

Answer 1

The default csv.writer setup should handle this properly. Here’s a simple example:

import csv

myparagraph = """
this is a long paragraph, with "quotes" and stuff.
"""

mycsv = csv.writer(open('foo.csv', 'wb'))
mycsv.writerow([myparagraph, 'word1'])
mycsv.writerow(['word2', 'word3'])

This yields the following csv file:

"
this is a long paragraph, with ""quotes"" and stuff.
",word1
word2,word3

Which should load into your favorite csv opening tool with no problems, as a having two rows and two columns.