Python - how to read/parse csv like line?

Question

I have done some search but most answer is about reading a complete csv file and none of these is like the problem I'm facing.

I'm trying to read a file from net using urllib2:

request = urllib2.Request('http://.../tv.txt')
response = urllib2.urlopen(request)
lines = response.readlines()
for line in lines:
    ...

The "line" format looks like these:

"ABC", "XYZ,MNO", "KLM"
"ABC", "MN"
"ABC", "123", "10", "OPPA GANGNAM STYLE", "LADY"

As seen above, these lines are not actually CSV lines. The number of columns keeps changing.

Is there a way to split each line into a list? The desire result should be:

["ABC", "XYZ,MNO", "KLM"]
["ABC", "MN"]
["ABC", "123", "10", "OPPA GANGNAM STYLE", "LADY"]

I've tried using line.split(",") but it cannot split correctly because there is comma inside each pair of double quotes.

Please help me if you know how to. Thank you very much.

Cheers,

PHP-Python-Java-MySQL-newbie.

Answer 1

use the csv module, it does what you need.

yourstring= '"ABC", "XYZ,MNO", "KLM"\n"ABC", "MN"\n"ABC", "123", "10", "OPPA GANGNAM STYLE", "LADY"'

import csv
import io

class MyDialect(csv.Dialect):
    strict = True
    skipinitialspace = True
    quoting = csv.QUOTE_ALL
    delimiter = ','
    quotechar = '"'
    lineterminator = '\n'


b = io.StringIO(yourstring)
r = csv.reader(b, MyDialect())

for i in r:
    print len(i), ':',' @ '.join(i)