Question

I’m using the csv module in python and escape characters keep messing up my csv’s. For example, if I had the following:

import csv

rowWriter = csv.writer(open('bike.csv', 'w'), delimiter = ",")

text1 = "I like to \n ride my bike"
text2 = "pumpkin sauce"

rowWriter.writerow([text1, text2])
rowWriter.writerow(['chicken','wings'])

I would like my csv to look like:

I like to \n ride my bike,pumpkin sauce
chicken,wings

But instead it turns out as

I like to
ride my bike,pumpkin sauce
chicken,wings

I’ve tried combinations of quoting, doublequote, escapechar and other parameters of the csv module, but I can’t seem to make it work. Does anyone know whats up with this?

*Note – I’m also using codecs encode(“utf-8”), so text1 really looks like "I like to \n ride my bike".encode("utf-8")

Answer 1

The problem is not with writing them to the file. The problem is that \n is a line break when inside '' or "". What you really want is either 'I like to \\n ride my bike' or r'I like to \n ride my bike' (notice the r prefix).