Question

What I’m trying to do is to ask a user for a name of a file to make and then save some stuff in this file.

My portion of the program looks like this:

    if saving == 1:
        ask=raw_input("Type the name file: ")
        fileout=open(ask.csv,"w")
        fileout.write(output)

I want the format to be .csv, I tried different options but can’t seem to work.

Answer 1

The issue here is you need to pass open() a string. ask is a variable that contains a string, but we also want to append the other string ".csv" to it to make it a filename. In python + is the concatenation operator for strings, so ask+".csv" means the contents of ask, followed by .csv. What you currently have is looking for the csv attribute of the ask variable, which will throw an error.

with open(ask+".csv", "w") as file:
    file.write(output)

You might also want to do a check first if the user has already typed the extension:

ask = ask if ask.endswith(".csv") else ask+".csv"
with open(ask, "w") as file:
        file.write(output)

Note my use of the with statement when opening files. It’s good practice as it’s more readable and ensures the file is closed properly, even on exceptions.

I am also using the python ternary operator here to do a simple variable assignment based on a condition (setting ask to itself if it already ends in ".csv", otherwise concatenating it).

Also, this is presuming your output is already suitable for a CSV file, the extension alone won’t make it CSV. When dealing with CSV data in general, you probably want to check out the csv module.