ValueError: could not convert string to float in a CSV file

Question

I'm trying to find the average of each row in a CSV file as follows:

import csv

with open('file.csv') as handle:
    reader = csv.reader(handle, quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONNUMERIC)
    for row in reader:
        scores = row
        average = sum([float(score) for score in scores]) / len(scores)

However, I'm always getting the following error:

ValueError: could not convert string to float:
'0.3183098861837984\t0.0021994616367169914\t0.0017398716418448568\t0.002779444153298143\t0.0044629274068791434\t0.0012644430669709003\t0.003083531279794444\t0.004509550881264837\t0.003608705125189259\t0.006833702582258458\t0.0018230394455706783\t0.001852023514636493\t0.004720184835956941\t0.006038977572546727\t0.004769535833937563\t0.0016622734203053761\t0.009311664834557762\t0.002327769746299017\t0.0020053588662354263\t0.006252191840044608\t0.006794853486350821\t0.007258945010249113\t0.00559368878955651\t0.002391455287537788\t0.002168369276873031'

How can I fix this error?

It looks like you're treating multiple tab-delimited values asa single value and trying to convert them all to a single float. Have you tried splitting the row on tab characters before trying to convert? — G. Anderson
– G. Anderson, Commented Jul 29, 2019 at 20:25
Specifying the field separator is mentioned here in the documentation (and shown in many of the example code snippets). — martineau
– martineau, Commented Jul 29, 2019 at 21:38

Poojan · Accepted Answer · 2019-07-29 20:26:27Z

2

your .csv file is tab separated and not , separated
use delimiter='\t' while reading the csv file. This should fix the problem.

import csv

with open('file.csv') as handle:
    reader = csv.reader(handle, delimiter='\t', quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONNUMERIC)
    for row in reader:
        scores = row
        average = sum([float(score) for score in scores]) / len(scores)

answered Jul 29, 2019 at 20:26

Poojan

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