Question

I’m trying to get a TAB-delimited (tsv) file loaded into a pandas DataFrame.

This is what I’m trying and the error I’m getting:

>>> df1 = DataFrame(csv.reader(open('c:/~/trainSetRel3.txt'), delimiter='\t'))

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#28>", line 1, in <module>
    df1 = DataFrame(csv.reader(open('c:/~/trainSetRel3.txt'), delimiter='\t'))
  File "C:\Python27\lib\site-packages\pandas\core\frame.py", line 318, in __init__
    raise PandasError('DataFrame constructor not properly called!')
PandasError: DataFrame constructor not properly called!

Answer 1

The .read_csv function does what you want:

pd.read_csv('c:/~/trainSetRel3.txt', sep='\t')

If you have a header, you can pass header=0.

pd.read_csv('c:/~/trainSetRel3.txt', sep='\t', header=0)

Note: Prior 17.0, pd.DataFrame.from_csv was used (it is now deprecated and the .from_csv documentation link redirects to the page for pd.read_csv).