Read a .csv into pandas from F: drive on Windows 7

Question

I have a .csv file on my F: drive on Windows 7 64-bit that I'd like to read into pandas and manipulate.

None of the examples I see read from anything other than a simple file name (e.g. 'foo.csv').

When I try this I get error messages that aren't making the problem clear to me:

import pandas as pd

trainFile = "F:/Projects/Python/coursera/intro-to-data-science/kaggle/data/train.csv"
trainData = pd.read_csv(trainFile)

The error message says:

IOError: Initializing from file failed

I'm missing something simple here. Can anyone see it?

Update:

I did get more information like this:

import csv

if __name__ == '__main__':
    trainPath = 'F:/Projects/Python/coursera/intro-to-data-science/kaggle/data/train.csv'
    trainData = []
    with open(trainPath, 'r') as trainCsv:
        trainReader = csv.reader(trainCsv, delimiter=',', quotechar='"')
        for row in trainReader:
            trainData.append(row)
    print trainData

I got a permission error on read. When I checked the properties of the file, I saw that it was read-only. I was able to read 892 lines successfully after unchecking it.

Now pandas is working as well. No need to move the file or amend the path. Thanks for looking.

Answer 1

I cannot promise that this will work, but it's worth a shot:

import pandas as pd
import os

trainFile = "F:/Projects/Python/coursera/intro-to-data-science/kaggle/data/train.csv"

pwd = os.getcwd()
os.chdir(os.path.dirname(trainFile))
trainData = pd.read_csv(os.path.basename(trainFile))
os.chdir(pwd)

Answer 2

A better solution is to use literal strings like r'pathname\filename' rather than 'pathname\filename'. See Lexical Analysis for more details.