13 PEP 305: Comma-separated Files
Comma-separated files are a format frequently used for exporting data from databases
and spreadsheets. Python 2.3 adds a parser for comma-separated files.
Comma-separated format is deceptively simple at first glance:
Read a line and call line.split(','): what could be simpler? But toss in
string data that can contain commas, and things get more complicated:
"Costs",150,200,3.95,"Includes taxes, shipping, and sundry items"
A big ugly regular expression can parse this, but using the new csv
package is much simpler:
import csv
input = open('datafile', 'rb')
reader = csv.reader(input)
for line in reader:
print line
The reader function takes a number of different options. The
field separator isn't limited to the comma and can be changed to any character, and so can
the quoting and line-ending characters.
Different dialects of comma-separated files can be defined and registered; currently
there are two dialects, both used by Microsoft Excel. A separate csv.writer
class will generate comma-separated files from a succession of tuples or lists, quoting
strings that contain the delimiter.
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