Question

I am very new to Python. I want to parse a csv file such that it will recognize quoted values – for example

1997,Ford,E350,”Super, luxurious truck”

should be split as

(‘1997’, ‘Ford’, ‘E350’, ‘Super, luxurious truck’)

and NOT

(‘1997’, ‘Ford’, ‘E350’, ‘”Super’, ‘ luxurious truck”‘)

the above is what I get if I use something like str.split(,).

How do I do this?
Also would it be best to store these values in an array or some other data structure? because after I get these values from the csv I want to be able to easily choose, lets say any two of the columns and store it as another array or some other data structure.

Answer 1

The following method worked perfectly

d = {}
d['column1name'] = []
d['column2name'] = []
d['column3name'] = []

dictReader = csv.DictReader(open('filename.csv', 'rb'), fieldnames = ['column1name', 'column2name', 'column3name'], delimiter = ',', quotechar = '"')

for row in dictReader:
    for key in row:
        d[key].append(row[key])

The columns are stored in dictionary with the column names as the key.