Question

I’m attempting to write a small python script that processes through CSV data. I read the URL and the data is there when I print the variable, but when I parse it using either csv.reader or csv.DictReader it only reads the first character as a field name and then the next character as the value for it. I don’t understand what I’m doing wrong and I would appreciate the help.

Here’s my code:

import sys
import os
import urllib2
import csv
response = urllib2.urlopen('http://ichart.finance.yahoo.com/table.csv?s=YHOO&d=0&e=28&f=2010&g=d&a=3&b=12&c=2009&ignore=.csv')
html = response.read()
informed = csv.DictReader(html)

for row in informed:
  print row

which prints out a dictionary of [‘D’:’a’] for the first row, and all the rest are character pairs. Any help is appreciated. I’m using python 2.6 on Windows.

Answer 1

According to the csv module docs, you need to pass a file or file-like object to the reader, not a string. I’m not familiar with what urlopen returns, but you could try passing response to the reader. Or, you could use a StringIO object which is for just this purpose – html = StringIO.StringIO(response.read()) ought to do it.