Read specific columns in csv using python

Question

I have a csv file that look like this:

+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+-----+
| AAA | bbb | ccc | DDD | eee | FFF | GGG | hhh |
+-----+-----+-----+-----+---         


        

Answer 1

Context: For this type of work you should use the amazing python petl library. That will save you a lot of work and potential frustration from doing things 'manually' with the standard csv module. AFAIK, the only people who still use the csv module are those who have not yet discovered better tools for working with tabular data (pandas, petl, etc.), which is fine, but if you plan to work with a lot of data in your career from various strange sources, learning something like petl is one of the best investments you can make. To get started should only take 30 minutes after you've done pip install petl. The documentation is excellent.

Answer: Let's say you have the first table in a csv file (you can also load directly from the database using petl). Then you would simply load it and do the following.

from petl import fromcsv, look, cut, tocsv    

    #Load the table
    table1 = fromcsv('table1.csv')
    # Alter the colums
    table2 = cut(table1, 'Song_Name','Artist_ID')
    #have a quick look to make sure things are ok.  Prints a nicely formatted table to your console
    print look(table2)
    # Save to new file
    tocsv(table2, 'new.csv')