Question

I am new to python so this may sound very basic. I have imported a csv file using csv2rec. The first row has headers. I want to change the headers to ‘x’, ‘y’, ‘z’. What’s the best way of doing this?

>>> import matplotlib
>>> import matplotlib.mlab as mlab
>>> r= mlab.csv2rec('HeightWeight.csv', delimiter= ',')
>>> names= r.dtype.names
>>> for i in names:
     print i


index
heightinches
weightpounds

Answer 1

mlab.csv2rec has a names parameter which you can use to set the column names:

r= mlab.csv2rec('HeightWeight.csv', delimiter= ',', 
                 names=['apple', 'pear'], 
                 skiprows=1)

When names is not None, csv2rec assumes there is no header row. So use skiprows=1 to ignore the header row.