Question

I have list where each element is a dictionary.

myList = [
{mykey1:myValue1, myKey2:myValue2},
{myKey1:myValue1b, myKey2:myValue2b}
]

I want a CSV file with just values for each entry. To get this, I need a list where each element is a string of comma separate values. So it would be of the form:

myValuesOnlyList=[ "myValue1, myValue2",
"myValue1b, myValue2b"]

To do this, I do something like:

for mydict in myList:
    row = ','.join(str(e) for e in mydict.values());
    myValuesOnlyList.append(row);

IS there a more pythonic way to do this?

Answer 1

Use the csv.DictWriter class, it’ll write the values directly for you:

fields = ('mykey1', 'mykey2', ...)
with open('output.csv', 'wb') as f:
    writer = csv.DictWriter(f, fields)
    writer.writerow({f: f for f in fields})  # write a header row
    for entry in myList:
        write.writerow(entry)