Question

I have the following Python code. It reads a csv file and outputs the first column to a new csv file.

But the problem is in my csv file there is \n apart from new lines for creating new rows. But they are wrapped within a double quote.

For instance like this:

A, B, C,
D, "12
34", E,
F, G, H

So I think i need to add quotechar='”‘ somewhere but I couldnt figure it out.

f_in = open('source.csv')

fields = []

for line in f_in.readlines():
    fields.append([item.strip('\n') for item in line.split(',')])
f_in.close()

f_out = open('sourceNew.csv', 'w')

for i in range(len(fields)):
    if fields[i][0] != '':
        f_out.write(fields[i][0] + ',,\n')


f_out.close()

How can i distinguish the real new row \n and \n wrapped in a double quote.

Thanks

Answer 1

Use the Python CSV module:

import csv

records = []
reader = csv.reader(open('source.csv', 'rb'))

for record in reader:
    print record
    records.append(record)

I hope this helps.