Parsing CSV data from memory in Python

Question

Is there a way to parse CSV data in Python when the data is not in a file? I'm storing CSV data in my database and I'd like to parse it. I'm looking for something analogous to Ruby's CSV.parse. I know Python has a CSV class but everything I've seen in the docs seems to deal with files as opposed to in-memory CSV data.

(And it's not an option to parse the data before it goes into the database.)

(And please don't tell me not to store the CSV data in the database. I know what I'm doing as far as the database goes.)

Answer 1

There is no special distinction for files about the python csv module. You can use StringIO to wrap your strings as file-like objects.