Question

I have copied this script from python web site:

import sqlite3
import csv
import codecs
import cStringIO
import sys

class UTF8Recoder:
    """
    Iterator that reads an encoded stream and reencodes the input to UTF-8
    """
    def __init__(self, f, encoding):
        self.reader = codecs.getreader(encoding)(f)

    def __iter__(self):
        return self

    def next(self):
        return self.reader.next().encode("utf-8")

class UnicodeReader:
    """
    A CSV reader which will iterate over lines in the CSV file "f",
    which is encoded in the given encoding.
    """

    def __init__(self, f, dialect=csv.excel, encoding="utf-8", **kwds):
        f = UTF8Recoder(f, encoding)
        self.reader = csv.reader(f, dialect=dialect, **kwds)

    def next(self):
        row = self.reader.next()
        return [unicode(s, "utf-8") for s in row]

    def __iter__(self):
        return self

class UnicodeWriter:
    """
    A CSV writer which will write rows to CSV file "f",
    which is encoded in the given encoding.
    """

    def __init__(self, f, dialect=csv.excel, encoding="utf-8", **kwds):
        # Redirect output to a queue
        self.queue = cStringIO.StringIO()
        self.writer = csv.writer(self.queue, dialect=dialect, **kwds)
        self.stream = f
        self.encoder = codecs.getincrementalencoder(encoding)()

    def writerow(self, row):
        self.writer.writerow([s.encode("utf-8") for s in row])
        # Fetch UTF-8 output from the queue ...
        data = self.queue.getvalue()
        data = data.decode("utf-8")
        # ... and reencode it into the target encoding
        data = self.encoder.encode(data)
        # write to the target stream
        self.stream.write(data)
        # empty queue
        self.queue.truncate(0)

    def writerows(self, rows):
        for row in rows:
            self.writerow(row)

When I run this script, I get this error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "makeCSV.py", line 20, in <module>
    class UnicodeReader:
  File "makeCSV.py", line 26, in UnicodeReader
    def __init__(self, f, dialect=csv.excel, encoding="utf-8", **kwds):
AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'excel'

What can be reason for this error and how can I fix it?

Answer 1

This module, csv, I do not think it is what you think it is. Check that you don’t have any csv.py on your path that is being imported instead of the stdlib csv module.

You can print out csv.__file__ (from within the script) to see where it’s coming from. Then, remove/move the offending file so that the stdlib csv will be imported.