Parsing a pipe delimited file in python

Question

I'm trying to parse a pipe-delimited file and pass the values into a list, so that later I can print selective values from the list.

The file looks like:

name|age|address|phone|||||||||||..etc

It has more than 100 columns.

Answer 1

Use the 'csv' library.

First, register your dialect:

import csv
csv.register_dialect('piper', delimiter='|', quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONE)

Then, use your dialect on the file:

with open(myfile, "rb") as csvfile:
    for row in csv.DictReader(csvfile, dialect='piper'):
        print row['name']

Answer 2

If you're parsing a very simple file that won't contain any | characters in the actual field values, you can use split:

fileHandle = open('file', 'r')

for line in fileHandle:
    fields = line.split('|')

    print(fields[0]) # prints the first fields value
    print(fields[1]) # prints the second fields value

fileHandle.close()

A more robust way to parse tabular data would be to use the csv library as mentioned in Spencer Rathbun's answer.