In today’s organizational working environment, data
sharing is one of the major tasks to be carried out, largely through spreadsheets or databases. A basic approach to share data is through the comma separated values (CSV) file. CSV is a simple flat file in a human readable format which is extensively used to store tabular data, in a spreadsheet or database. A CSV file stores tabular data (numbers and text) in plain text. Files in the CSV format can be imported to and exported from programs that store data in tables, such as Microsoft Excel or OpenOffice Calc. Already defined, CSV stands for “comma separated values”. Thus, we can say that a comma separated file is a delimited text file that uses a comma to separate values. Each line in a file is known as data/record. Each record consists of one or more fields, separated by commas (also known as delimiters), i.e., each of the records is also a part of this file. Tabular data is stored as text in a CSV file. The use of comma as a field separator is the source of the name for this file format. It stores our data into a spreadsheet or a database. Thus, in a nutshell, the several advantages that are offered by CSV files are as follows: ▪faster to handle. ▪smaller in size. ▪ easy to generate and import onto a spreadsheet or database. ▪human readable and easy to edit manually. ▪simple to implement and parse. ▪processed by almost all existing applications. How to create CSV file
Method 1 (From MS-Excel):
Open Excel, delete all the sheet except sheet 1 Type all the data, in separate cells Save it as csv file in your desired location. If any warning comes, click on "YES‟ When you close the excel, choose "NO‟ Now file is created at your desired location, go and double click or open with notepad to check the content How to create CSV file Method 2 (From Notepad): Open Notepad Type record by separating each column value by comma(,) Every record in separate line Save it by giving extension .csv (Put the name in double quotes to ensure .Txt will not be appended with file name for e.g. if you want it to save with name emp then give name as “emp.csv” in double quotes File is created close it and double click to open and check CSV FILE HANDLING IN PYTHON
For working with CSV files in Python, there is an
inbuilt module called CSV. It is used to read and write tabular data in CSV format. Therefore, to perform read and write operations with CSV file, we must import CSV module. CSV module can handle CSV files correctly regardless of the operating system on which the files were created. Along with this module, open() function is used to open a CSV file and return file object. We load the module in the usual way using import: >>> importcsv Like other files (text and binary) in Python, there are two basic operations that can be carried out on a CSV file: ▪ Reading from a csv file ▪ Writing to a csv file Data in Excel and its corresponding csv file
In student.csv (notepad) file, the first line is the header and remaining lines are the data/ records. The fields are separated by comma, or we may say the separator character. In general, the separator character is called a delimiter, and the comma is not the only one used. Other popular delimiters include the tab (\t), colon (:) and semi-colon (;) characters Program to count number of records in the file
Output
9 Records but output showing 10 Program to print the records in the form of comma separated values, instead of lists
Output In the above program, we have used a new function join(). join() is a string method that joins all values of each row with comma separator. Thus, all the records are displayed as a string separated by a comma separator and not as a list and hence the output is so obtained Python program to search for given student name in csv file
Output Writing to a CSV File • To write to a CSV file in Python, we can use the csv.writer() function. The csv.writer() function returns a writer object that converts the user’s data into a delimited string. This string can later be used to write into CSV files using the writerow() function. • In order to write to a CSV file, we create a special type of object to write to the CSV file “writer object”, which is defined in the CSV module, and which we create using the writer() function. • The writerow() method allows us to write a list of fields to the file. The fields can be strings or numbers or both. Also, while using writerow(), you do not need to add a new line character (or other EOL indicator) to indicate the end of the line; writerow() does it for you as necessary. Program to write data onto student.csv file using writerow() • In the above program, the very first line is for importing csv file into your program. Next, whatever are the column headings for our data are mentioned as a list in the variable called fields. All the data stored inside these fields is placed inside the variable called rows. • Now give the name of your file, let us say, student.csv. This will be created and stored inside your current working directory or the path that you mentioned (as we have given for D:/) for the attribute “filename”. • ‘w’ stands for write mode and we are using the file by opening it using “with open”, since using with open does not require the file to be closed explicitly. The next statement comprises the most important function used for writing onto csv file, viz. csv.writer(), to obtain a writer object and store it in the variable csv_w as the name of the variable, and this is the CSV object. writer() takes the name of file object ‘f’ as the argument. By default, the delimiter is comma (,). • writerow(fields) is going to write the fields which are the column headings into the file and have to be written only once. Using for loop, rows are traversed from the list of rows from the file. writerow(i) is writing the data row-wise in the for loop and in the end the file is automatically closed. • Also, while giving csv.writer(), the delimiter taken is comma. We can change the delimiter whenever and wherever required by changing the argument passed to delimiter attribute. • For example, delimiter = "|" (pipe symbol). You can put any character as delimiter and if nothing is given, comma is placed by default. • writerow() method is used to write each row. • In this program, we have used for loop for writing data row-wise onto the file using writerow() method. We can avoid using for loop and can write all the rows/records in one go. • This can be done by using writerows() method. writerows() writes all the rows in one go, so you need not use for loop and iterations. Program to store data in csv file Program to create CSV file and store empno,name,salary and search any empno and display name, salary and if not found then display appropriate message. DictReader and DictWriter The csv.DictReader class operates like a regular reader but maps the information read into a dictionary. The keys for the dictionary can be passed in with the fieldnames parameter or inferred from the first row of the CSV file. The csv.DictWriter class operates like a regular writer but maps Python dictionaries into CSV rows. The fieldnames parameter is a sequence of keys that identify the order in which values in the dictionary passed to the writerow() method are written to the CSV file. DictWriter Examples import csv with open('names.csv', 'w', newline='') as csvfile: x= ['first_name', 'last_name'] writer =csv.DictWriter(csvfile , fieldnames=x) writer.writeheader() writer.writerow ({'first_name': 'Ajay', 'last_name': 'Arora'}) writer.writerow ({'first_name': 'Armaan', 'last_name': 'Arora'}) writer.writerow ({'first_name': 'Aakash', 'last_name': 'Aloria'})
Both the programs are writing a header row and data onto a csv file in the form of a dictionary. Rows are mapped into a dictionary. Fieldnames are sequence of keys. DictReader import csv reader = csv.DictReader(open("sample.csv")) for row in reader: print(row)
