Read CSV file with comma within fields in Python

Question

I need to read a CSV file which has fields that have a comma, so I have double quoted the fields which contains commas, such as:

1, "text1,text2", "text3, text4", a, b, c 

But when I try to read the file in Python I get the fields separated by the commas, as following:

row[0] = 1 row[1] = text1 row[2] = text2 row[3] = text3 row[4] = text4 row[5] = a row[6] = b row[7] = c 

I am reading the CSV file with the following code:

info = csv.reader(open('./info.csv'))   for row in info :     print row[0] + " * " + row[1] ... 

Is it possible to read double quoted fields which contains a comma?

Answer 1

The Python csv module actually does support quoted fields, even by default. Your problem here is that Python by default does not skip the space, so you need to use skipinitialspace=True.

>>> s = StringIO.StringIO('1, "text1,text2", "text3, text4", a, b, c') >>> list(csv.reader(s, skipinitialspace=True)) [['1', 'text1,text2', 'text3, text4', 'a', 'b', 'c']]