Question

I am trying to solve this problem.
I am reading data from csv fiile which has the following columns:

id, name, price

So i use the following code to read the csv:

import sys
import csv as input

def readFile(path):
    try:
        finput = input.reader(open(path,'rb'),delimiter=',',quotechar='|')
    except IOError as (errno,strerror):
            print "I/O error({0}): {1}".format(errno,strerror)
    except:
            print "Unexpected Error: ",sys.exc_info()[0]
            raise
    # covert format into list
    fmod = list(finput)
    return fmod

but the problem is the name field can be like

name, item_det
now that ” , ” creates a trouble for me..
instead of reading the name field as a single entity having a comma in the description..
it splits that particular field.
How do I solve this.
Thanks

Answer 1

CSV is exactly that: “Comma Separated”. You either need to quote the name field:

|name,item_det|

Or use an escape character, but you have to turn it on by setting quoting to QUOTE_NONE:

reader = csv.reader(open(path, "rb"), delimiter=',', quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONE, escapechar="\\")

Example:

name\,item_det

Otherwise, don’t use the csv module.