Python csv string to array

Anyone know of a simple library or function to parse a csv encoded string and turn it into an array or dictionary?

I don't think I want the built in csv module because in all the examples I've seen that takes filepaths, not strings.

9 Answers

You can convert a string to a file object using io.StringIO and then pass that to the csv module:

from io import StringIO import csv scsv = """text,with,Polish,non-Latin,letters 1,2,3,4,5,6 a,b,c,d,e,f gęś,zółty,wąż,idzie,wąską,dróżką, """ f = StringIO(scsv) reader = csv.reader(f, delimiter=',') for row in reader: print('\t'.join(row)) 

simpler version with split() on newlines:

reader = csv.reader(scsv.split('\n'), delimiter=',') for row in reader: print('\t'.join(row)) 

Or you can simply split() this string into lines using \n as separator, and then split() each line into values, but this way you must be aware of quoting, so using csv module is preferred.

On Python 2 you have to import StringIO as

from StringIO import StringIO 

instead.

Simple - the csv module works with lists, too:

>>> a=["1,2,3","4,5,6"] # or a = "1,2,3\n4,5,6".split('\n') >>> import csv >>> x = csv.reader(a) >>> list(x) [['1', '2', '3'], ['4', '5', '6']] 

The official doc for csv.reader() is very helpful, which says

file objects and list objects are both suitable

import csv text = """1,2,3 a,b,c d,e,f""" lines = text.splitlines() reader = csv.reader(lines, delimiter=',') for row in reader: print('\t'.join(row)) 

Per the documentation:

And while the module doesn’t directly support parsing strings, it can easily be done:

import csv for row in csv.reader(['one,two,three']): print row 

Just turn your string into a single element list.

Importing StringIO seems a bit excessive to me when this example is explicitly in the docs.

As others have already pointed out, Python includes a module to read and write CSV files. It works pretty well as long as the input characters stay within ASCII limits. In case you want to process other encodings, more work is needed.

The Python documentation for the csv module implements an extension of csv.reader, which uses the same interface but can handle other encodings and returns unicode strings. Just copy and paste the code from the documentation. After that, you can process a CSV file like this:

with open("some.csv", "rb") as csvFile: for row in UnicodeReader(csvFile, encoding="iso-8859-15"): print row 

Not a generic CSV parser but usable for simple strings with commas.

>>> a = "1,2" >>> a '1,2' >>> b = a.split(",") >>> b ['1', '2'] 

To parse a CSV file:

f = open(file.csv, "r") lines = f.read().split("\n") # "\r\n" if needed for line in lines: if line != "": # add other needed checks to skip titles cols = line.split(",") print cols 

csvfile can be any object which supports the iterator protocol and returns a string each time its next() method is called

Thus, a StringIO.StringIO(), str.splitlines() or even a generator are all good.

Use this to have a csv loaded into a list

import csv csvfile = open(myfile, 'r') reader = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter='\t') my_list = list(reader) print my_list >>>[['1st_line', '0'], ['2nd_line', '0']] 

Here's an alternative solution:

>>> import pyexcel as pe >>> text="""1,2,3 ... a,b,c ... d,e,f""" >>> s = pe.load_from_memory('csv', text) >>> s Sheet Name: csv +---+---+---+ | 1 | 2 | 3 | +---+---+---+ | a | b | c | +---+---+---+ | d | e | f | +---+---+---+ >>> s.to_array() [[u'1', u'2', u'3'], [u'a', u'b', u'c'], [u'd', u'e', u'f']] 

Here's the documentation