Question

So I want to convert a simple tab delimited text file into a csv file. If I convert the txt file into a string using string.split(‘\n’) I get a list with each list item as a string with ‘\t’ between each column. I was thinking I could just replace the ‘\t’ with a comma but it won’t treat the string within the list like string and allow me to use string.replace. Here is start of my code that still needs a way to parse the tab “\t”.

import csv
import sys

txt_file = r"mytxt.txt"
csv_file = r"mycsv.csv"

in_txt = open(txt_file, "r")
out_csv = csv.writer(open(csv_file, 'wb'))

file_string = in_txt.read()

file_list = file_string.split('\n')

for row in ec_file_list:       
    out_csv.writerow(row)

Answer 1

csv supports tab delimited files. Supply the delimiter argument to reader:

import csv

txt_file = r"mytxt.txt"
csv_file = r"mycsv.csv"

# use 'with' if the program isn't going to immediately terminate
# so you don't leave files open
# the 'b' is necessary on Windows
# it prevents \x1a, Ctrl-z, from ending the stream prematurely
# and also stops Python converting to / from different line terminators
# On other platforms, it has no effect
in_txt = csv.reader(open(txt_file, "rb"), delimiter = '\t')
out_csv = csv.writer(open(csv_file, 'wb'))

out_csv.writerows(in_txt)