Reading column names alone in a csv file

Question

I have a csv file with the following columns:

id,name,age,sex

Followed by a lot of values for the above columns. I am trying to read the column names alone and put them inside a list.

I am using Dictreader and this gives out the correct details:

with open('details.csv') as csvfile:     i=["name","age","sex"]     re=csv.DictReader(csvfile)     for row in re:         for x in i:             print row[x] 

But what I want to do is, I need the list of columns, ("i" in the above case)to be automatically parsed with the input csv than hardcoding them inside a list.

with open('details.csv') as csvfile:         rows=iter(csv.reader(csvfile)).next()     header=rows[1:]     re=csv.DictReader(csvfile)     for row in re:         print row         for x in header:                          print row[x] 

This gives out an error

Keyerrror:'name' 

in the line print row[x]. Where am I going wrong? Is it possible to fetch the column names using Dictreader?

Answer 1

Though you already have an accepted answer, I figured I'd add this for anyone else interested in a different solution-

• Python's DictReader object in the CSV module (as of Python 2.6 and above) has a public attribute called fieldnames. https://docs.python.org/3.4/library/csv.html#csv.csvreader.fieldnames

An implementation could be as follows:

import csv  with open('C:/mypath/to/csvfile.csv', 'r') as f:     d_reader = csv.DictReader(f)      #get fieldnames from DictReader object and store in list     headers = d_reader.fieldnames      for line in d_reader:         #print value in MyCol1 for each row         print(line['MyCol1']) 

In the above, d_reader.fieldnames returns a list of your headers (assuming the headers are in the top row). Which allows...

>>> print(headers) ['MyCol1', 'MyCol2', 'MyCol3'] 

If your headers are in, say the 2nd row (with the very top row being row 1), you could do as follows:

import csv  with open('C:/mypath/to/csvfile.csv', 'r') as f:     #you can eat the first line before creating DictReader.     #if no "fieldnames" param is passed into     #DictReader object upon creation, DictReader     #will read the upper-most line as the headers     f.readline()      d_reader = csv.DictReader(f)     headers = d_reader.fieldnames      for line in d_reader:         #print value in MyCol1 for each row         print(line['MyCol1'])