reading a CSV files columns directly into variables names with python

Question

I want to read a CSV file\'s columns directly into variables. The result should be something like you would get with the following shell line: while IFS=, read ColumnName1

Answer 1

Here's a "dictreader" for a headless csv, each row will be a dictionary with sequential keys 'column_0', 'column_1', 'column_2' and so on...

import csv

csvfile = list(csv.reader(open('data.csv')))

csvdics = []

for row in csvfile:
    row_dict = {}
    for i in xrange(len(row)):
        row_dict['column_%s' % i] = row[i]
    csvdics.append(row_dict)

Or, if you know ahead of time what the column names should be, you can pass them in a list as a second argument to DictReader.