Difficulty reading .dat file in Pandas

Question

I want to take this .dat file: Airline list and convert it into a readable CSV file. However, for some reason each time I do this:

df = pd.read_csv('/path/airlines.dat', sep='\s+', header=None, skiprows=1)

I get the following error:

ParserError: Error tokenizing data. C error: Expected 2 fields in line 3, saw 3

Am I correctly reading this file? What am I doing wrong?

Please paste the first 5 lines of .dat file here for inspection. — LazyCoder
– LazyCoder, Commented Jul 26, 2019 at 23:14
That is already a comma separated file, isn't it? Try sep=','... — SpghttCd
– SpghttCd, Commented Jul 26, 2019 at 23:16

SpghttCd · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-26 23:28:57Z

1

First try

df = pd.read_csv('/path/airlines.dat', header=None, skiprows=1)

please.
Results in my case in

pd.read_csv('/path/airlines.dat', header=None, skiprows=1).head()


#    0                                             1  ...               6  7
# 0  1                                Private flight  ...             NaN  Y
# 1  2                                   135 Airways  ...   United States  N
# 2  3                                 1Time Airline  ...    South Africa  Y
# 3  4  2 Sqn No 1 Elementary Flying Training School  ...  United Kingdom  N
# 4  5                               213 Flight Unit  ...          Russia  N

# [5 rows x 8 columns]

edited Jul 26, 2019 at 23:28

answered Jul 26, 2019 at 23:22

SpghttCd

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1 Comment

Tim Gottgetreu Over a year ago

and specify column names with: names = ['C1','C2','C3','C4','C5','C6','C7'], etc.

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