Why is 'rblabla' a valid csv file mode? - python

I have a csv file and a function to read it.
I can open it in many ways, most of these modes produce similar results.
def read(mode):
with open("file.csv", mode) as inf:
reader = csv.reader(inf)
for row in reader:
print row
read('r') #prints \r\n characters
read('rb') #prints \r\n characters
read('rU') #prints \n characters but not \r characters
read('rblabla') #WAT.
I am wondering why the last example is allowed. It produces the same results as normal read mode.
Is there any reason why it works this way?

The mode is not for the csv reader, but for the python default file handler. Python only enforces mode to begin with 'r', 'w' or 'a', after stripping U. This is documented here, and is for python 2.5 and later.
The mode is an attribute of the file handler, and may be used by other applications, hence it may contain more characters.

Related

Unwanted blanks while writing data into csv using python [duplicate]

import csv
with open('test.csv', 'w') as outfile:
writer = csv.writer(outfile, delimiter=',', quoting=csv.QUOTE_MINIMAL)
writer.writerow(['hi', 'dude'])
writer.writerow(['hi2', 'dude2'])
The above code generates a file, test.csv, with an extra \r at each row, like so:
hi,dude\r\r\nhi2,dude2\r\r\n
instead of the expected
hi,dude\r\nhi2,dude2\r\n
Why is this happening, or is this actually the desired behavior?
Python 3:
The official csv documentation recommends opening the file with newline='' on all platforms to disable universal newlines translation:
with open('output.csv', 'w', newline='', encoding='utf-8') as f:
writer = csv.writer(f)
...
The CSV writer terminates each line with the lineterminator of the dialect, which is '\r\n' for the default excel dialect on all platforms because that's what RFC 4180 recommends.
Python 2:
On Windows, always open your files in binary mode ("rb" or "wb"), before passing them to csv.reader or csv.writer.
Although the file is a text file, CSV is regarded a binary format by the libraries involved, with \r\n separating records. If that separator is written in text mode, the Python runtime replaces the \n with \r\n, hence the \r\r\n observed in the file.
See this previous answer.
While #john-machin gives a good answer, it's not always the best approach. For example, it doesn't work on Python 3 unless you encode all of your inputs to the CSV writer. Also, it doesn't address the issue if the script wants to use sys.stdout as the stream.
I suggest instead setting the 'lineterminator' attribute when creating the writer:
import csv
import sys
doc = csv.writer(sys.stdout, lineterminator='\n')
doc.writerow('abc')
doc.writerow(range(3))
That example will work on Python 2 and Python 3 and won't produce the unwanted newline characters. Note, however, that it may produce undesirable newlines (omitting the LF character on Unix operating systems).
In most cases, however, I believe that behavior is preferable and more natural than treating all CSV as a binary format. I provide this answer as an alternative for your consideration.
In Python 3 (I haven't tried this in Python 2), you can also simply do
with open('output.csv','w',newline='') as f:
writer=csv.writer(f)
writer.writerow(mystuff)
...
as per documentation.
More on this in the doc's footnote:
If newline='' is not specified, newlines embedded inside quoted fields
will not be interpreted correctly, and on platforms that use \r\n
linendings on write an extra \r will be added. It should always be
safe to specify newline='', since the csv module does its own
(universal) newline handling.
You can introduce the lineterminator='\n' parameter in the csv writer command.
import csv
delimiter='\t'
with open('tmp.csv', '+w', encoding='utf-8') as stream:
writer = csv.writer(stream, delimiter=delimiter, quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONE, quotechar='', lineterminator='\n')
writer.writerow(['A1' , 'B1', 'C1'])
writer.writerow(['A2' , 'B2', 'C2'])
writer.writerow(['A3' , 'B3', 'C3'])
You have to add attribute newline="\n" to open function like this:
with open('file.csv','w',newline="\n") as out:
csv_out = csv.writer(out, delimiter =';')
Note that if you use DictWriter, you will have a new line from the open function and a new line from the writerow function.
You can use newline='' within the open function to remove the extra newline.

How to modify a CSV file in python? [duplicate]

import csv
with open('thefile.csv', 'rb') as f:
data = list(csv.reader(f))
import collections
counter = collections.defaultdict(int)
for row in data:
counter[row[10]] += 1
with open('/pythonwork/thefile_subset11.csv', 'w') as outfile:
writer = csv.writer(outfile)
for row in data:
if counter[row[10]] >= 504:
writer.writerow(row)
This code reads thefile.csv, makes changes, and writes results to thefile_subset1.
However, when I open the resulting csv in Microsoft Excel, there is an extra blank line after each record!
Is there a way to make it not put an extra blank line?
The csv.writer module directly controls line endings and writes \r\n into the file directly. In Python 3 the file must be opened in untranslated text mode with the parameters 'w', newline='' (empty string) or it will write \r\r\n on Windows, where the default text mode will translate each \n into \r\n.
#!python3
with open('/pythonwork/thefile_subset11.csv', 'w', newline='') as outfile:
writer = csv.writer(outfile)
In Python 2, use binary mode to open outfile with mode 'wb' instead of 'w' to prevent Windows newline translation. Python 2 also has problems with Unicode and requires other workarounds to write non-ASCII text. See the Python 2 link below and the UnicodeReader and UnicodeWriter examples at the end of the page if you have to deal with writing Unicode strings to CSVs on Python 2, or look into the 3rd party unicodecsv module:
#!python2
with open('/pythonwork/thefile_subset11.csv', 'wb') as outfile:
writer = csv.writer(outfile)
Documentation Links
https://docs.python.org/3/library/csv.html#csv.writer
https://docs.python.org/2/library/csv.html#csv.writer
Opening the file in binary mode "wb" will not work in Python 3+. Or rather, you'd have to convert your data to binary before writing it. That's just a hassle.
Instead, you should keep it in text mode, but override the newline as empty. Like so:
with open('/pythonwork/thefile_subset11.csv', 'w', newline='') as outfile:
Note: It seems this is not the preferred solution because of how the extra line was being added on a Windows system. As stated in the python document:
If csvfile is a file object, it must be opened with the ‘b’ flag on platforms where that makes a difference.
Windows is one such platform where that makes a difference. While changing the line terminator as I described below may have fixed the problem, the problem could be avoided altogether by opening the file in binary mode. One might say this solution is more "elegent". "Fiddling" with the line terminator would have likely resulted in unportable code between systems in this case, where opening a file in binary mode on a unix system results in no effect. ie. it results in cross system compatible code.
From Python Docs:
On Windows, 'b' appended to the mode
opens the file in binary mode, so
there are also modes like 'rb', 'wb',
and 'r+b'. Python on Windows makes a
distinction between text and binary
files; the end-of-line characters in
text files are automatically altered
slightly when data is read or written.
This behind-the-scenes modification to
file data is fine for ASCII text
files, but it’ll corrupt binary data
like that in JPEG or EXE files. Be
very careful to use binary mode when
reading and writing such files. On
Unix, it doesn’t hurt to append a 'b'
to the mode, so you can use it
platform-independently for all binary
files.
Original:
As part of optional paramaters for the csv.writer if you are getting extra blank lines you may have to change the lineterminator (info here). Example below adapated from the python page csv docs. Change it from '\n' to whatever it should be. As this is just a stab in the dark at the problem this may or may not work, but it's my best guess.
>>> import csv
>>> spamWriter = csv.writer(open('eggs.csv', 'w'), lineterminator='\n')
>>> spamWriter.writerow(['Spam'] * 5 + ['Baked Beans'])
>>> spamWriter.writerow(['Spam', 'Lovely Spam', 'Wonderful Spam'])
The simple answer is that csv files should always be opened in binary mode whether for input or output, as otherwise on Windows there are problems with the line ending. Specifically on output the csv module will write \r\n (the standard CSV row terminator) and then (in text mode) the runtime will replace the \n by \r\n (the Windows standard line terminator) giving a result of \r\r\n.
Fiddling with the lineterminator is NOT the solution.
A lot of the other answers have become out of date in the ten years since the original question. For Python3, the answer is right in the documentation:
If csvfile is a file object, it should be opened with newline=''
The footnote explains in more detail:
If newline='' is not specified, newlines embedded inside quoted fields will not be interpreted correctly, and on platforms that use \r\n linendings on write an extra \r will be added. It should always be safe to specify newline='', since the csv module does its own (universal) newline handling.
Use the method defined below to write data to the CSV file.
open('outputFile.csv', 'a',newline='')
Just add an additional newline='' parameter inside the open method :
def writePhoneSpecsToCSV():
rowData=["field1", "field2"]
with open('outputFile.csv', 'a',newline='') as csv_file:
writer = csv.writer(csv_file)
writer.writerow(rowData)
This will write CSV rows without creating additional rows!
I'm writing this answer w.r.t. to python 3, as I've initially got the same problem.
I was supposed to get data from arduino using PySerial, and write them in a .csv file. Each reading in my case ended with '\r\n', so newline was always separating each line.
In my case, newline='' option didn't work. Because it showed some error like :
with open('op.csv', 'a',newline=' ') as csv_file:
ValueError: illegal newline value: ''
So it seemed that they don't accept omission of newline here.
Seeing one of the answers here only, I mentioned line terminator in the writer object, like,
writer = csv.writer(csv_file, delimiter=' ',lineterminator='\r')
and that worked for me for skipping the extra newlines.
with open(destPath+'\\'+csvXML, 'a+') as csvFile:
writer = csv.writer(csvFile, delimiter=';', lineterminator='\r')
writer.writerows(xmlList)
The "lineterminator='\r'" permit to pass to next row, without empty row between two.
Borrowing from this answer, it seems like the cleanest solution is to use io.TextIOWrapper. I managed to solve this problem for myself as follows:
from io import TextIOWrapper
...
with open(filename, 'wb') as csvfile, TextIOWrapper(csvfile, encoding='utf-8', newline='') as wrapper:
csvwriter = csv.writer(wrapper)
for data_row in data:
csvwriter.writerow(data_row)
The above answer is not compatible with Python 2. To have compatibility, I suppose one would simply need to wrap all the writing logic in an if block:
if sys.version_info < (3,):
# Python 2 way of handling CSVs
else:
# The above logic
I used writerow
def write_csv(writer, var1, var2, var3, var4):
"""
write four variables into a csv file
"""
writer.writerow([var1, var2, var3, var4])
numbers=set([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16])
rules = list(permutations(numbers, 4))
#print(rules)
selection=[]
with open("count.csv", 'w',newline='') as csvfile:
writer = csv.writer(csvfile)
for rule in rules:
number1,number2,number3,number4=rule
if ((number1+number2+number3+number4)%5==0):
#print(rule)
selection.append(rule)
write_csv(writer,number1,number2,number3,number4)
When using Python 3 the empty lines can be avoid by using the codecs module. As stated in the documentation, files are opened in binary mode so no change of the newline kwarg is necessary. I was running into the same issue recently and that worked for me:
with codecs.open( csv_file, mode='w', encoding='utf-8') as out_csv:
csv_out_file = csv.DictWriter(out_csv)

want to write data in csv file using csv module but in file data are being written are alternate rows [duplicate]

import csv
with open('thefile.csv', 'rb') as f:
data = list(csv.reader(f))
import collections
counter = collections.defaultdict(int)
for row in data:
counter[row[10]] += 1
with open('/pythonwork/thefile_subset11.csv', 'w') as outfile:
writer = csv.writer(outfile)
for row in data:
if counter[row[10]] >= 504:
writer.writerow(row)
This code reads thefile.csv, makes changes, and writes results to thefile_subset1.
However, when I open the resulting csv in Microsoft Excel, there is an extra blank line after each record!
Is there a way to make it not put an extra blank line?
The csv.writer module directly controls line endings and writes \r\n into the file directly. In Python 3 the file must be opened in untranslated text mode with the parameters 'w', newline='' (empty string) or it will write \r\r\n on Windows, where the default text mode will translate each \n into \r\n.
#!python3
with open('/pythonwork/thefile_subset11.csv', 'w', newline='') as outfile:
writer = csv.writer(outfile)
In Python 2, use binary mode to open outfile with mode 'wb' instead of 'w' to prevent Windows newline translation. Python 2 also has problems with Unicode and requires other workarounds to write non-ASCII text. See the Python 2 link below and the UnicodeReader and UnicodeWriter examples at the end of the page if you have to deal with writing Unicode strings to CSVs on Python 2, or look into the 3rd party unicodecsv module:
#!python2
with open('/pythonwork/thefile_subset11.csv', 'wb') as outfile:
writer = csv.writer(outfile)
Documentation Links
https://docs.python.org/3/library/csv.html#csv.writer
https://docs.python.org/2/library/csv.html#csv.writer
Opening the file in binary mode "wb" will not work in Python 3+. Or rather, you'd have to convert your data to binary before writing it. That's just a hassle.
Instead, you should keep it in text mode, but override the newline as empty. Like so:
with open('/pythonwork/thefile_subset11.csv', 'w', newline='') as outfile:
Note: It seems this is not the preferred solution because of how the extra line was being added on a Windows system. As stated in the python document:
If csvfile is a file object, it must be opened with the ‘b’ flag on platforms where that makes a difference.
Windows is one such platform where that makes a difference. While changing the line terminator as I described below may have fixed the problem, the problem could be avoided altogether by opening the file in binary mode. One might say this solution is more "elegent". "Fiddling" with the line terminator would have likely resulted in unportable code between systems in this case, where opening a file in binary mode on a unix system results in no effect. ie. it results in cross system compatible code.
From Python Docs:
On Windows, 'b' appended to the mode
opens the file in binary mode, so
there are also modes like 'rb', 'wb',
and 'r+b'. Python on Windows makes a
distinction between text and binary
files; the end-of-line characters in
text files are automatically altered
slightly when data is read or written.
This behind-the-scenes modification to
file data is fine for ASCII text
files, but it’ll corrupt binary data
like that in JPEG or EXE files. Be
very careful to use binary mode when
reading and writing such files. On
Unix, it doesn’t hurt to append a 'b'
to the mode, so you can use it
platform-independently for all binary
files.
Original:
As part of optional paramaters for the csv.writer if you are getting extra blank lines you may have to change the lineterminator (info here). Example below adapated from the python page csv docs. Change it from '\n' to whatever it should be. As this is just a stab in the dark at the problem this may or may not work, but it's my best guess.
>>> import csv
>>> spamWriter = csv.writer(open('eggs.csv', 'w'), lineterminator='\n')
>>> spamWriter.writerow(['Spam'] * 5 + ['Baked Beans'])
>>> spamWriter.writerow(['Spam', 'Lovely Spam', 'Wonderful Spam'])
The simple answer is that csv files should always be opened in binary mode whether for input or output, as otherwise on Windows there are problems with the line ending. Specifically on output the csv module will write \r\n (the standard CSV row terminator) and then (in text mode) the runtime will replace the \n by \r\n (the Windows standard line terminator) giving a result of \r\r\n.
Fiddling with the lineterminator is NOT the solution.
A lot of the other answers have become out of date in the ten years since the original question. For Python3, the answer is right in the documentation:
If csvfile is a file object, it should be opened with newline=''
The footnote explains in more detail:
If newline='' is not specified, newlines embedded inside quoted fields will not be interpreted correctly, and on platforms that use \r\n linendings on write an extra \r will be added. It should always be safe to specify newline='', since the csv module does its own (universal) newline handling.
Use the method defined below to write data to the CSV file.
open('outputFile.csv', 'a',newline='')
Just add an additional newline='' parameter inside the open method :
def writePhoneSpecsToCSV():
rowData=["field1", "field2"]
with open('outputFile.csv', 'a',newline='') as csv_file:
writer = csv.writer(csv_file)
writer.writerow(rowData)
This will write CSV rows without creating additional rows!
I'm writing this answer w.r.t. to python 3, as I've initially got the same problem.
I was supposed to get data from arduino using PySerial, and write them in a .csv file. Each reading in my case ended with '\r\n', so newline was always separating each line.
In my case, newline='' option didn't work. Because it showed some error like :
with open('op.csv', 'a',newline=' ') as csv_file:
ValueError: illegal newline value: ''
So it seemed that they don't accept omission of newline here.
Seeing one of the answers here only, I mentioned line terminator in the writer object, like,
writer = csv.writer(csv_file, delimiter=' ',lineterminator='\r')
and that worked for me for skipping the extra newlines.
with open(destPath+'\\'+csvXML, 'a+') as csvFile:
writer = csv.writer(csvFile, delimiter=';', lineterminator='\r')
writer.writerows(xmlList)
The "lineterminator='\r'" permit to pass to next row, without empty row between two.
Borrowing from this answer, it seems like the cleanest solution is to use io.TextIOWrapper. I managed to solve this problem for myself as follows:
from io import TextIOWrapper
...
with open(filename, 'wb') as csvfile, TextIOWrapper(csvfile, encoding='utf-8', newline='') as wrapper:
csvwriter = csv.writer(wrapper)
for data_row in data:
csvwriter.writerow(data_row)
The above answer is not compatible with Python 2. To have compatibility, I suppose one would simply need to wrap all the writing logic in an if block:
if sys.version_info < (3,):
# Python 2 way of handling CSVs
else:
# The above logic
I used writerow
def write_csv(writer, var1, var2, var3, var4):
"""
write four variables into a csv file
"""
writer.writerow([var1, var2, var3, var4])
numbers=set([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16])
rules = list(permutations(numbers, 4))
#print(rules)
selection=[]
with open("count.csv", 'w',newline='') as csvfile:
writer = csv.writer(csvfile)
for rule in rules:
number1,number2,number3,number4=rule
if ((number1+number2+number3+number4)%5==0):
#print(rule)
selection.append(rule)
write_csv(writer,number1,number2,number3,number4)
When using Python 3 the empty lines can be avoid by using the codecs module. As stated in the documentation, files are opened in binary mode so no change of the newline kwarg is necessary. I was running into the same issue recently and that worked for me:
with codecs.open( csv_file, mode='w', encoding='utf-8') as out_csv:
csv_out_file = csv.DictWriter(out_csv)

Writing a string to CSV using line escapes in python 3

Working in Python 3.7.
I'm currently pulling data from an API (Qualys's API, fetching a report) to be specific. It returns a string with all the report data in a CSV format with each new line designated with a '\r\n' escape.
(i.e. 'foo,bar,stuff\r\n,more stuff,data,report\r\n,etc,etc,etc\r\n')
The problem I'm having is writing this string properly to a CSV file. Every iteration of code I've tried writes the data cell by cell when viewed in Excel with the \r\n appended to where ever it was in the string all on one row, rather than on a new line.
(i.e |foo|bar|stuff\r\n|more stuff|data|report\r\n|etc|etc|etc\r\n|)
I'm just making the switch from 2 to 3 so I'm almost positive it's a syntactical error or an error with my understanding of how python 3 handles new line delimiters or something along those lines, but even after reviewing documentation, here and blog posts I just cant either cant get my head around it, or I'm consistently missing something.
current code:
def dl_report(id, title):
data = {'action': 'fetch', 'id': id}
res = a.request('/api/2.0/fo/report/', data=data)
print(type(res)) #returns string
#input('pause')
f_csv = open(title,'w', newline='\r\n')
f_csv.write(res)
f_csv.close
but i've also tried:
with open(title, 'w', newline='\r\n') as f:
writer = csv.writer(f,<tried encoding here, no luck>)
writer.writerows(res)
#anyone else looking at this, this didn't work because of the difference
#between writerow() and writerows()
and I've also tried various ways to declare newline, such as:
newline=''
newline='\n'
etc...
and various other iterations along these lines. Any suggestions or guidance or... anything at this point would be awesome.
edit:
Ok, I've continued to work on it, and this kinda works:
def dl_report(id, title):
data = {'action': 'fetch', 'id': id}
res = a.request('/api/2.0/fo/report/', data=data)
print(type(res)) #returns string
reader = csv.reader(res.split(r'\r\n'), delimiter=',')
with open(title, 'w') as outfile:
writer = csv.writer(outfile, delimiter= '\n')
writer.writerow(reader)
But its ugly, and does create errors in the output CSV (some rows (less than 1%) don't parse as a CSV row, probably a formatting error somewhere..), but more concerning is that it works wonky when a "\" is presented in data.
I would really be interested in a solution that works... better? More pythonic? more consistently would be nice...
Any ideas?
Based on your comments, the data you're being served doesn't actually include carriage returns or newlines, it includes the text representing the escapes for carriage returns and newlines (so it really has a backslash, r, backslash, n in the data). It's otherwise already in the form you want, so you don't need to involve the csv module at all, just interpret the escapes to their correct value, then write the data directly.
This is relatively simple using the unicode-escape codec (which also handles ASCII escapes):
import codecs # Needed for text->text decoding
# ... retrieve data here, store to res ...
# Converts backslash followed by r to carriage return, by n to newline,
# and so on for other escapes
decoded = codecs.decode(res, 'unicode-escape')
# newline='' means don't perform line ending conversions, so you keep \r\n
# on all systems, no adding, no removing characters
# You may want to explicitly specify an encoding like UTF-8, rather than
# relying on the system default, so your code is portable across locales
with open(title, 'w', newline='') as f:
f.write(decoded)
If the strings you receive are actually wrapped in quotes (so print(repr(s)) includes quotes on either end), it's possible they're intended to be interpreted as JSON strings. In that case, just replace the import and creation of decoded with:
import json
decoded = json.loads(res)
If I understand your question correctly, can't you just replace the string?
with open(title, 'w') as f: f.write(res.replace("¥r¥n","¥n"))
Check out this answer:
Python csv string to array
According to CSVReader's documentation, it expects \r\n as the line delimiter by default. Your string should work fine with it. If you load the string into the CSVReader object, then you should be able to check for the standard way to export it.
Python strings use the single \n newline character. Normally, a \r\n is converted to \n when a file is read
and the newline is converted \n or \r\n depending on your system default and the newline= parameter on write.
In your case, \r wasn't removed when you read it from the web interface. When you opened the file with newline='\r\n', python expanded the \n as it was supposed to, but the \r passed through and now your neline is \r\r\n. You can see that by rereading the text file in binary mode:
>>> res = 'foo,bar,stuff\r\n,more stuff,data,report\r\n,etc,etc,etc\r\n'
>>> open('test', 'w', newline='\r\n').write(res)
54
>>> open('test', 'rb').read()
b'foo,bar,stuff\r\r\n,more stuff,data,report\r\r\n,etc,etc,etc\r\r\n'
Since you already have the line endings you want, just write in binary mode and skip the conversions:
>>> open('test', 'wb').write(res.encode())
54
>>> open('test', 'rb').read()
b'foo,bar,stuff\r\n,more stuff,data,report\r\n,etc,etc,etc\r\n'
Notice I used the system default encoding, but you likely want to standardize on an encoding.

Python csv writer adds extra row when performed on windows [duplicate]

import csv
with open('thefile.csv', 'rb') as f:
data = list(csv.reader(f))
import collections
counter = collections.defaultdict(int)
for row in data:
counter[row[10]] += 1
with open('/pythonwork/thefile_subset11.csv', 'w') as outfile:
writer = csv.writer(outfile)
for row in data:
if counter[row[10]] >= 504:
writer.writerow(row)
This code reads thefile.csv, makes changes, and writes results to thefile_subset1.
However, when I open the resulting csv in Microsoft Excel, there is an extra blank line after each record!
Is there a way to make it not put an extra blank line?
The csv.writer module directly controls line endings and writes \r\n into the file directly. In Python 3 the file must be opened in untranslated text mode with the parameters 'w', newline='' (empty string) or it will write \r\r\n on Windows, where the default text mode will translate each \n into \r\n.
#!python3
with open('/pythonwork/thefile_subset11.csv', 'w', newline='') as outfile:
writer = csv.writer(outfile)
In Python 2, use binary mode to open outfile with mode 'wb' instead of 'w' to prevent Windows newline translation. Python 2 also has problems with Unicode and requires other workarounds to write non-ASCII text. See the Python 2 link below and the UnicodeReader and UnicodeWriter examples at the end of the page if you have to deal with writing Unicode strings to CSVs on Python 2, or look into the 3rd party unicodecsv module:
#!python2
with open('/pythonwork/thefile_subset11.csv', 'wb') as outfile:
writer = csv.writer(outfile)
Documentation Links
https://docs.python.org/3/library/csv.html#csv.writer
https://docs.python.org/2/library/csv.html#csv.writer
Opening the file in binary mode "wb" will not work in Python 3+. Or rather, you'd have to convert your data to binary before writing it. That's just a hassle.
Instead, you should keep it in text mode, but override the newline as empty. Like so:
with open('/pythonwork/thefile_subset11.csv', 'w', newline='') as outfile:
Note: It seems this is not the preferred solution because of how the extra line was being added on a Windows system. As stated in the python document:
If csvfile is a file object, it must be opened with the ‘b’ flag on platforms where that makes a difference.
Windows is one such platform where that makes a difference. While changing the line terminator as I described below may have fixed the problem, the problem could be avoided altogether by opening the file in binary mode. One might say this solution is more "elegent". "Fiddling" with the line terminator would have likely resulted in unportable code between systems in this case, where opening a file in binary mode on a unix system results in no effect. ie. it results in cross system compatible code.
From Python Docs:
On Windows, 'b' appended to the mode
opens the file in binary mode, so
there are also modes like 'rb', 'wb',
and 'r+b'. Python on Windows makes a
distinction between text and binary
files; the end-of-line characters in
text files are automatically altered
slightly when data is read or written.
This behind-the-scenes modification to
file data is fine for ASCII text
files, but it’ll corrupt binary data
like that in JPEG or EXE files. Be
very careful to use binary mode when
reading and writing such files. On
Unix, it doesn’t hurt to append a 'b'
to the mode, so you can use it
platform-independently for all binary
files.
Original:
As part of optional paramaters for the csv.writer if you are getting extra blank lines you may have to change the lineterminator (info here). Example below adapated from the python page csv docs. Change it from '\n' to whatever it should be. As this is just a stab in the dark at the problem this may or may not work, but it's my best guess.
>>> import csv
>>> spamWriter = csv.writer(open('eggs.csv', 'w'), lineterminator='\n')
>>> spamWriter.writerow(['Spam'] * 5 + ['Baked Beans'])
>>> spamWriter.writerow(['Spam', 'Lovely Spam', 'Wonderful Spam'])
The simple answer is that csv files should always be opened in binary mode whether for input or output, as otherwise on Windows there are problems with the line ending. Specifically on output the csv module will write \r\n (the standard CSV row terminator) and then (in text mode) the runtime will replace the \n by \r\n (the Windows standard line terminator) giving a result of \r\r\n.
Fiddling with the lineterminator is NOT the solution.
A lot of the other answers have become out of date in the ten years since the original question. For Python3, the answer is right in the documentation:
If csvfile is a file object, it should be opened with newline=''
The footnote explains in more detail:
If newline='' is not specified, newlines embedded inside quoted fields will not be interpreted correctly, and on platforms that use \r\n linendings on write an extra \r will be added. It should always be safe to specify newline='', since the csv module does its own (universal) newline handling.
Use the method defined below to write data to the CSV file.
open('outputFile.csv', 'a',newline='')
Just add an additional newline='' parameter inside the open method :
def writePhoneSpecsToCSV():
rowData=["field1", "field2"]
with open('outputFile.csv', 'a',newline='') as csv_file:
writer = csv.writer(csv_file)
writer.writerow(rowData)
This will write CSV rows without creating additional rows!
I'm writing this answer w.r.t. to python 3, as I've initially got the same problem.
I was supposed to get data from arduino using PySerial, and write them in a .csv file. Each reading in my case ended with '\r\n', so newline was always separating each line.
In my case, newline='' option didn't work. Because it showed some error like :
with open('op.csv', 'a',newline=' ') as csv_file:
ValueError: illegal newline value: ''
So it seemed that they don't accept omission of newline here.
Seeing one of the answers here only, I mentioned line terminator in the writer object, like,
writer = csv.writer(csv_file, delimiter=' ',lineterminator='\r')
and that worked for me for skipping the extra newlines.
with open(destPath+'\\'+csvXML, 'a+') as csvFile:
writer = csv.writer(csvFile, delimiter=';', lineterminator='\r')
writer.writerows(xmlList)
The "lineterminator='\r'" permit to pass to next row, without empty row between two.
Borrowing from this answer, it seems like the cleanest solution is to use io.TextIOWrapper. I managed to solve this problem for myself as follows:
from io import TextIOWrapper
...
with open(filename, 'wb') as csvfile, TextIOWrapper(csvfile, encoding='utf-8', newline='') as wrapper:
csvwriter = csv.writer(wrapper)
for data_row in data:
csvwriter.writerow(data_row)
The above answer is not compatible with Python 2. To have compatibility, I suppose one would simply need to wrap all the writing logic in an if block:
if sys.version_info < (3,):
# Python 2 way of handling CSVs
else:
# The above logic
I used writerow
def write_csv(writer, var1, var2, var3, var4):
"""
write four variables into a csv file
"""
writer.writerow([var1, var2, var3, var4])
numbers=set([1,2,3,4,5,6,7,2,4,6,8,10,12,14,16])
rules = list(permutations(numbers, 4))
#print(rules)
selection=[]
with open("count.csv", 'w',newline='') as csvfile:
writer = csv.writer(csvfile)
for rule in rules:
number1,number2,number3,number4=rule
if ((number1+number2+number3+number4)%5==0):
#print(rule)
selection.append(rule)
write_csv(writer,number1,number2,number3,number4)
When using Python 3 the empty lines can be avoid by using the codecs module. As stated in the documentation, files are opened in binary mode so no change of the newline kwarg is necessary. I was running into the same issue recently and that worked for me:
with codecs.open( csv_file, mode='w', encoding='utf-8') as out_csv:
csv_out_file = csv.DictWriter(out_csv)

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