csv writer adds double quotes twice in python

Question

I have written a python script to append href attribute and tag to a string holding a url which is in a csv file. The problem is that the result is not as expected. The resulted html string has got an extra double quote instead of single. Any suggestion how to fix this? Below is the snippet:

InputFile = open('data1.csv', 'rb')
OutputFile = open('data3.csv', 'a+b')

CsvReader_InputFile = csv.reader(InputFile, delimiter=',', quotechar='\"')
CsvWriter_OutputFile = csv.writer(OutputFile, delimiter=',', quotechar='\"')

Row_InputFile = CsvReader_InputFile.next()
Row_InputFile[2] = "<a href=\"" + Row_InputFile[2] + "\">Link</a>"
CsvWriter_OutputFile.writerow(Row_InputFile)

Output:

"<a href=""http://www.google.com"">Link</a>"

Wanted Output:

"<a href="http://www.google.com">Link</a>"

Answer 1

This is correct behaviour. Double quotes are escaped inside csv value.

If you want to output without escaping try csv.QUOTE_NONE

csv.writer(OutputFile, delimiter=',', quotechar='\"', quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONE)

Answer 2

I ran into this when trying to store a JSON object as a string in a column in a csv. I had single quotes around a string filled with double quotes. my row of data looked like

['foo', 'bar', '{"foo":"bar". "bar":"foo"}']

Doing this solved it for me

writer = csv.writer(csv_file, delimiter=',', quotechar="\'", quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONE)