How to replace characters in a csv file - python

I'm doing some measurements in the lab and want to transform them into some nice Python plots. The problem is the way the software exports CSV files, as I can't find a way to properly read the numbers. It looks like this:
-10;-0,0000026
-8;-0,00000139
-6;-0,000000546
-4;-0,000000112
-2;-5,11E-09
0,0000048;6,21E-09
2;0,000000318
4;0,00000304
6;0,0000129
8;0,0000724
10;0,000268
Separation by ; is fine, but I need every , to be ..
Ideally I would like Python to be able to read numbers such as 6.21E-09 as well, but I should be able to fix that in excel...
My main issue: Change every , to . so Python can read them as a float.

The simplest way would be for you to convert them to string and then use the .replace() method to pretty much do anything. For i.e.
txt = "0,0000048;6,21E-09"
txt = txt.replace(';', '.')
You could also read the CSV file (I don't know how you are reading the file) but depending on the library, you could change the 'delimiter' (to : for example). CSV is Comma-separated values and as the name implies, it separates columns by means of '.

You can do whatever you want in Python, for example:
import csv
with open('path_to_csv_file', 'r') as csv_file:
data = list(csv.reader(csv_file, delimiter=';'))
data = [(int(raw_row[0]), float(raw_row[1].replace(',', '.'))) for row in data]
with open('path_to_csv_file', 'w') as csv_file:
writer = csv.writer(csv_file, delimiter=';')
writer.writerows(data)

Can you consider a regex to match the ',' all in the text, then loop the match results in a process that takes ',' to '.'.

Related

python convert CSV with comas inside values into Dictionary

I need to process some CSV data I get from an external provider I can't control.
The data has a fixed amount of columns, but variable amounts of rows.
To summarize, it can look like this:
Version,Relative Path,Author,Date,Comment,Link
1,somePath,someperson,01/20/2020,"Some phrase with punctuation including comas, but in which case it seems to be automatically formatted with quotes...",some.url
3,somePath,someperson,01/20/2020,Simple comment with no punctuation,another.url
50,somePath,someperson,01/20/2020,Another comment,some.url
AFAIK the best way for me to do it is using this:
import csv
with open("sample.csv", "r") as csvFile:
reader = csv.DictReader(csvFile)
data = {}
for row_dict in reader:
for key, value in row_dict.items():
data[key] = data.get(key, []) + [value]
print(data)
And the result looks great! Except for the "Comment" column: as the comments have punctuations, and the CSV delimiter is ,, this leads to the script splitting these commands into different items and messing up the dictionary.
I wish I could ask the provider to make a specific CSV output for me, but that's unlikely to happen.
HOWEVER: it looks like any comment item that contains such commas inside are provided between quotation marks ". So I was wondering if I could somehow make the delimiter ignore whatever's between quotes?
Or if you have anything better to obtain the same result, I'm fine with it. Though I can only use vanilla python 3.10.2, no modules like numpy (even though I'd love it). And if the solution is to edit the CSV's content, then it should preserve the comas inside the comments.
Here is how I solve a similar situation...
quote_character='"'
file_reader = csv.DictReader(csvfile, delimiter=delimiter, quotechar=quote_character,
restkey='unrecognized_cols')
Note the quotechar parameter.

Why is my csv file separated by " \t " instead of commas (" , ")?

I downloaded data from internet and saved as a csv (comma delimited) file. The image shows what the file looks like in excel.
Using csv.reader in python, I printed each row. I have shown my code below along with the output in Spyder.
import csv
with open('p_dat.csv', 'r') as file:
reader = csv.reader(file)
for row in reader:
print(row)
I am very confused as to why my values are not comma separated. Any help will be greatly appreciated.
As pointed out in the comments, technically this is a TSV (tab-separated values) file, which is actually perfectly valid.
In practice, of course, not all libraries will make a "hard" distinction between a TSV and CSV file. The way you parse a TSV file is basically the same as the way you parse a CSV file, except that the delimiter is different.
There are actually multiple valid delimiters for this kind of file, such as tabs, commas, and semicolons. Which one you choose is honestly a matter of preference, not a "hard" technical limit.
See the specification for csvs. There are many options for the delimiter in the file. In this case you have a tab, \t.
The option is important. Suppose your data had commas in it, then a , as a delimiter would not be a good choice.
Even though they're named comma-separated values, they're sometimes separated by different symbols (like the tab character that you have currently).
If you want to use Python to view this as a comma-separated file, you can try something like:
import csv
...
with open('p_dat.csv', 'r') as file:
reader = csv.reader(file)
for row in reader:
commarow = row.replace("\t",",")
print(commarow)

Issue with parsing csv from Django web form

I was hoping someone could help me with this. I'm getting a file from a form in Django, this file is a csv and I'm trying to read it with Python's library csv. The problem here is that when I apply the function csv.reader and I turn that result into a list in order to print it, I find out that csv.reader is not splitting correctly my file.
Here are some images to show the problem
This is my csv file:
This my code:
And this is the printed value of the variable file_readed:
As you can see in the picture, it seems to be splitting my file character by character with some exceptions.
I thank you for any help you can provide me.
If you are pulling from a web form, try getting the csv as a string, confirm in a print or debug tool that the result is correct, and then pass it to csv using StringIO.
from io import StringIO
import csv
csv_string = form.files['carga_cie10'].file_read().decode(encoding="ISO-88590-1")
csv_file = StringIO(csv_string)
reader = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=',', quotechar='"')
for row in reader:
print(row)
Another thing you can try is changing the lineterminator argument to csv.reader(). It can default to \r\n but the web form might use some other value. Inspect the string you get from the web form to confirm.
that CSV does not seem right: you got some lines with more arguments than others.
The acronym of CSV being Comma Separated Values, you need to have the exact same arguments separated by commas for each line, or else it will mess it up.
I see in your lines you're maybe expecting to have 3 columns, instead you got lines with 2, or 4 arguments, and some of them have an opening " in one argument, comma, then closing " in the second argument
check if your script works with other CSVs maybe
Most likely you need to specify delimiter. Since you haven't explicitly told about the delimiter, I guess it's confused.
csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=',')
However, since there are quotations with comma delimiter, you may need to alter the default delimiter on the CSV file's creation too for tab or something else.
The problem is here:
print(list(file_readed))
'list' is causing printing of every element within the csv as an individual unit.
Try this instead:
with open('carga_cie10') as f:
reader = csv.reader(f)
for row in reader:
print(" ".join(row))
Edit:
import pandas as pd
file_readed = pd.read_csv(file_csv)
print(file_readed)
The output should look clean. Pandas is highly useful in situations where data needs to be read, manipulated, changed, etc.

Python: Write output in a csv-file

I have the following text (as string, \t = Tab):
Article_1 \t Title of Article \t author of article \n
Article_2 \t Title of Art 2 \t author of article 2 \n
I'd like to save this in a csv-file s.t. I can open it in Excel. In fact, it is possible to open the file I got in Excel, but the program writes everything in the first column, but I'd like to have "art_1, art_2, ..." in the first column, the titles in the second and the authors in the third column. How can I do this?
Thanks for any help! :)
If you have a string, str, one easy way is just:
with open("file.csv","w") as f:
f.write(','.join(str.split()))
If you have multiple strings, and they are stored in a list, str_list, you could do this:
with open("file.csv","w") as f:
for line in str_list:
f.write(','.join(line.split()))
f.write('\n')
If the question is how to split one monolithic string into manageable sub-strings, then that's a different question. In that case you'd want to split() on the \t and then go through the list 3 at a time.
There's also a csv python package that provides a clean way of creating csv files from python data structures.
In case you want to use the csv module
import csv
with open("csv_file.csv", "wb") as csv_file:
csv_writer = csv.writer(csv_file, delimiter=",")
for str in list_of_articles:
csv_writer.writerow(str.split("\t"))

How to convert tab separated, pipe separated to CSV file format in Python

I have a text file (.txt) which could be in tab separated format or pipe separated format, and I need to convert it into CSV file format. I am using python 2.6. Can any one suggest me how to identify the delimiter in a text file, read the data and then convert that into comma separated file.
Thanks in advance
I fear that you can't identify the delimiter without knowing what it is. The problem with CSV is, that, quoting ESR:
the Microsoft version of CSV is a textbook example of how not to design a textual file format.
The delimiter needs to be escaped in some way if it can appear in fields. Without knowing, how the escaping is done, automatically identifying it is difficult. Escaping could be done the UNIX way, using a backslash '\', or the Microsoft way, using quotes which then must be escaped, too. This is not a trivial task.
So my suggestion is to get full documentation from whoever generates the file you want to convert. Then you can use one of the approaches suggested in the other answers or some variant.
Edit:
Python provides csv.Sniffer that can help you deduce the format of your DSV. If your input looks like this (note the quoted delimiter in the first field of the second row):
a|b|c
"a|b"|c|d
foo|"bar|baz"|qux
You can do this:
import csv
csvfile = open("csvfile.csv")
dialect = csv.Sniffer().sniff(csvfile.read(1024))
csvfile.seek(0)
reader = csv.DictReader(csvfile, dialect=dialect)
for row in reader:
print row,
# => {'a': 'a|b', 'c': 'd', 'b': 'c'} {'a': 'foo', 'c': 'qux', 'b': 'bar|baz'}
# write records using other dialect
Your strategy could be the following:
parse the file with BOTH a tab-separated csv reader and a pipe-separated csv reader
calculate some statistics on resulting rows to decide which resultset is the one you want to write. An idea could be counting the total number of fields in the two recordset (expecting that tab and pipe are not so common). Another one (if your data is strongly structured and you expect the same number of fields in each line) could be measuring the standard deviation of number of fields per line and take the record set with the smallest standard deviation.
In the following example you find the simpler statistic (total number of fields)
import csv
piperows= []
tabrows = []
#parsing | delimiter
f = open("file", "rb")
readerpipe = csv.reader(f, delimiter = "|")
for row in readerpipe:
piperows.append(row)
f.close()
#parsing TAB delimiter
f = open("file", "rb")
readertab = csv.reader(f, delimiter = "\t")
for row in readerpipe:
tabrows.append(row)
f.close()
#in this example, we use the total number of fields as indicator (but it's not guaranteed to work! it depends by the nature of your data)
#count total fields
totfieldspipe = reduce (lambda x,y: x+ y, [len(f) for f in piperows])
totfieldstab = reduce (lambda x,y: x+ y, [len(f) for f in tabrows])
if totfieldspipe > totfieldstab:
yourrows = piperows
else:
yourrows = tabrows
#the var yourrows contains the rows, now just write them in any format you like
Like this
from __future__ import with_statement
import csv
import re
with open( input, "r" ) as source:
with open( output, "wb" ) as destination:
writer= csv.writer( destination )
for line in input:
writer.writerow( re.split( '[\t|]', line ) )
I would suggest taking some of the example code from the existing answers, or perhaps better use the csv module from python and change it to first assume tab separated, then pipe separated, and produce two output files which are comma separated. Then you visually examine both files to determine which one you want and pick that.
If you actually have lots of files, then you need to try to find a way to detect which file is which.
One of the examples has this:
if "|" in line:
This may be enough: if the first line of a file contains a pipe, then maybe the whole file is pipe separated, else assume a tab separated file.
Alternatively fix the file to contain a key field in the first line which is easily identified - or maybe the first line contains column headers which can be detected.
for line in open("file"):
line=line.strip()
if "|" in line:
print ','.join(line.split("|"))
else:
print ','.join(line.split("\t"))

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