Split string with unexpected behaviour?

Question

I am reading a csv file and I use a split on every line but I do not fully understand the behavior.

csv file:

id;name;number
1111;foo \nbar;2.00
2222;a 0,25;1.00

code:

for file in csvs:
    with open(file, encoding = "utf8") as f:
        reader = csv.reader(f)
        for row in reader:
            if isinstance(row, str):
                print(row)
            else:
                print(row[0].split(";"))

This yields:

['number', 'name', 'price']
['1111', 'foo \\nbar', '2.00']
['2222', 'a 0']

but I expected the last line to be:

['2222', 'a 0,25', '1.00']

The csv reader will assume your values are separated by commas if you do not tell it different. So the reader gives you a row with 2222;a 0 as the first element; and then you split it by ; subsequently. If you want to manually split each line, there is no need to use csv.reader. — khelwood
– khelwood, Commented Dec 29, 2020 at 23:54

SuperStormer · Accepted Answer · 2020-12-29 23:59:34Z

1

Use the delimiter arg to csv.reader to split on semicolons instead of commas:

for file in csvs:
    with open(file, encoding = "utf8") as f:
        reader = csv.reader(f,delimiter=";")
        for row in reader:
            print(row)

answered Dec 29, 2020 at 23:59

SuperStormer

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Comments

Electroboss · Accepted Answer · 2020-12-30 00:07:32Z

0

You could just use split() on its own. This is some code that should work (untested), assuming csv is the raw string data:

C = csv.split("\n")
Y = []
for X in C:
    Y.append(X.split(";"))

edited Dec 30, 2020 at 0:07

answered Dec 30, 2020 at 0:06

Electroboss

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2 Comments

Mark Tolonen Over a year ago

Better to use the csv module correctly, as it properly handles columns that contain the delimiter.

Electroboss Over a year ago

Sorry I really don't know much about this, am using my phone and it's 00:08 where I live. Please feel free to downvote and ignore this.

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