python csv module error

Question

When I use Pythons csv module, it shows me

"delimiter" must be an 1-character string"

My code is like this

 sep = ","
 srcdata = cStringIO.StringIO(wdata[1])
 data = csv.reader(srcdata, delimiter=sep)

wdata[1] is a string source.

How do I fix this problem?

Answer 1

You most likely have from __future__ import unicode_literals at the top of your module or you are using python 3.x+ You need to do something like this:

sep=b","  # notice the b before the "
srcdata=cStringIO.StringIO(wdata[1])
data = csv.reader(srcdata,delimiter=sep)

This tells Python that you want to represent "," as a byte string instead of a unicode literal.