Question

I suspect this is a common problem, but I counldn’t seem to locate the answer. I am trying to remove all commas from a csv file and replace them with colons. I would normally use sed or vi for this, but I need to use a purely python implementation. Here is what I have come up with so far:

import csv

with open("temp.csv", mode="rU") as infile:
    reader = csv.reader(infile, dialect="excel")    
    with open("temp2.txt", mode="w") as outfile:
        writer = csv.writer(outfile)
        for rows in reader:
            for parsed_item in rows:
                parsed_item = rows.replace(',', ':') # I can't do this with a list!
                writer.writerow(parsed_item)

Can anyone help me out with how to do this? Thanks in advance for your help.

Answer 1

The answer is easier than you think. You just need to set the delimiter for csv.writer:

import csv

row = #your data

with open("temp.csv", mode="rU") as infile:
    reader = csv.reader(infile, dialect="excel")    
    with open("temp2.txt", mode="w") as outfile:
        writer = csv.writer(outfile, delimiter=':')
        writer.writerows(rows)

You’re line trying to replace , with : wasn’t going to do anything because the row had already been processed by csv.reader.