I have a list of unicode string that I want to write to a cvs file.
with open(archive_dir_today + 'myfile.csv', 'wb') as f:
writer = csv.writer(f)
writer.writerows(list_diff_1)
this work fine, except that it writes every character in a separate cell.
For example the first entry in the list is "1000F034E2"
I end up with a row in the csv file that looks like this:
1,0,0,0,F,0,3,4,E,2
what is causing that problem?
You are using the wrong method; writer.writerows() expects multiple rows, but you only have one row. Use writer.writerow() (singular, no s) instead.
What happens is that because writerows() expects a list of rows, it treats each column in your single row as a list; the list of a unicode string is its individual characters:
>>> list(u'1000F034E2')
[u'1', u'0', u'0', u'0', u'F', u'0', u'3', u'4', u'E', u'2']
That's the row of columns being written out in that case.
If you wanted each item in the list as separate rows, then wrap them in list objects:
writer.writerows([column] for column in list_diff_1)
