Python CSV Parsing, Escaped Quote Character

Question

I am trying to parse a CSV file using the csv.reader, my data is separated by commas and each value starts and ends with quotation marks. Example:

"This is some data", "New data", "More \"data\" here", "test"

My problem is with the third value, the data I get which has quotation marks within it has an escape character to show it is part of the data. The python CSV reader does not use this escape character so it results in incorrect parsing.

I tried code like below:

    with open(filepath) as csv_file:
        csv_reader = csv.reader(csv_file, delimiter=',', quotechar='\\"')

But I get an error complaining the quotechar is not 1 character.

My current solution is just to replace all characters \" characters with a single quote ' before parsing with csv.reader - however, I would like to know if there is a better way without modifying the original data.

Answer 1

The issue here is that you need to define an escapechar, so that the csv reader knows to treat \" as ".

csv.reader(csv_file, quotechar='"', delimiter=',', escapechar='\\')