Question

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How to read a CSV line with "?

I have seen a number of related questions but none have directly addressed what I am trying to do.
I am reading in lines of text from a CSV file.

All the items are in quotes and some have additional commas within the quotes.
I would like to split the line along commas, but ignore the commas within quotes.
Is there a way to do this within Python that does not require a number of regex statements.

An example is:

"114111","Planes,Trains,and Automobiles","50","BOOK"

which I would like parsed into 4 separate variables of values:

"114111"  "Planes,Trains,and Automobiles"  "50" "Book"

Is there a simple option in line.split() that I am missing ?

Answer 1

If you want to read lines from a CSV file, use Python’s csv module from the standard library, which will handle the quoted comma separated values.

Example

# cat test.py
import csv
with open('some.csv') as f:
    reader = csv.reader(f)
    for row in reader:
        print(row)

# cat some.csv
"114111","Planes,Trains,and Automobiles","50","BOOK"

# python test.py

['114111', 'Planes,Trains,and Automobiles', '50', 'BOOK']
[]