Question

I’m getting to grips with my first Python project and have got pretty stumped trying to use Python’s csv.DictReader class to consume a CSV file.

Code is as follows:

import os
import csv

f = open('MyCsvFile.txt', 'rb')
d =  csv.Sniffer().sniff(f.read(1024), ',')
csvDict = csv.DictReader(csvfile = f, dialect = d)

for line in csvDict:
    print line['Balance Date ']

The csv file roughly looks like this:

"Balance Date ","Currency Code ","Main Account","Balance Float  - 1 Day",... forty more fields
"09/01/2011","EUR","4000519","                .00",...
"09/01/2011","GBP","4000519","                .00",...
"09/01/2011","JPY","4000519","                .00",...

Python is not liking my use of DictReader

g:\work\csvtest>python csvtest.py
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "csvtest.py", line 6, in <module>
    csvDict = csv.DictReader(csvfile = f, dialect = d)
TypeError: __init__() takes at least 2 arguments (2 given)

Could someone point me in the right direction?

Answer 1

According to the code supplied in the documentation, this would work better:

with open('MyCsvFile.txt', 'rb') as source:
    dialect = csv.Sniffer().sniff(source.read(1024), ',')
    source.seek(0)
    csvDict = csv.DictReader(source, dialect)