Working with CSV format

Please note that csv reader load data in a lazy manner. It ignores excessive trailing cells that has None value. For example, the following csv content:

1,2,,,,,
3,4,,,,,
5,,,,,,,

would end up as:

1,2
3,4
5,

Write to a csv file

Here’s the sample code to write an array to a csv file

>>> from pyexcel_io import save_data
>>> data = [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]]
>>> save_data("your_file.csv", data)

Change line endings

By default, python csv module provides windows line ending ‘rn’. In order to change it, you can do:

>>> save_data("your_file.csv", data, lineterminator='\n')

Read from a csv file

Here’s the sample code:

>>> from pyexcel_io import get_data
>>> data = get_data("your_file.csv")
>>> import json
>>> print(json.dumps(data))
{"your_file.csv": [["1", "2", "3"], ["4", "5", "6"]]}

Write a csv to memory

Here’s the sample code to write a dictionary as a csv into memory:

>>> from pyexcel_io import save_data
>>> data = [[1, 2, 3], [4, 5, 6]]
>>> io = StringIO()
>>> save_data(io, data)
>>> # do something with the io
>>> # In reality, you might give it to your http response
>>> # object for downloading

Read from a csv from memory

Continue from previous example:

>>> # This is just an illustration
>>> # In reality, you might deal with csv file upload
>>> # where you will read from requests.FILES['YOUR_XL_FILE']
>>> data = get_data(io)
>>> print(json.dumps(data))
{"csv": [["1", "2", "3"], ["4", "5", "6"]]}