How can Python be used to write line breaks to a csv as '\n'?

Question

I need to redefine the following code so that any line breaks in the row data (that would show up as a blank line) show as '\n' in the written file.

However, '\n' needs to be written after each row to show up as a blank line.

Each row apparently needs to be encoded as 'utf-8' to avoid errors.

with open('csvfile.csv', 'w') as csvOutput:
    testData = csv.writer(csvOutput, delimiter='|', escapechar=' ', quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONE)

    for row in data:
        newRow = [row[x].encode('utf-8') for x in xrange(len(row))]
        testData.writerow(newRow)
        testData.writerow(['\n'])

Answer 1

You need to manually replace newlines with \n using the replace method.

Set the lineterminator option to the desired character sequence. More info on what else is available is in the docs.

with open('csvfile.csv', 'w') as csvOutput:
    writer = csv.writer(csvOutput, delimiter='|', escapechar=' ', quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONE, lineterminator='\n')

    for row in data:
        writer.writerow([s.replace('\n', '\\n').encode('utf-8') for s in row])