Proper way to reset csv.reader for multiple iterations?

Question

Having an issue with a custom iterator in that it will only iterate over the file once. I am calling seek(0) on the relevant file object in between iterations, but

Answer 1

I think that you are better off not trying to do the .seek(0) but rather opening the file from the filename each time.

And I don't recommend you just return self in the __iter__() method. That means you only ever have one instance of your object. I don't know how likely it is for someone to try to use your object from two different threads, but if that happened the results would be surprising.

So, save the filename, and then in the __iter__() method, create a fresh object with a freshly initialized reader object and a freshly opened file handle object; return this new object from __iter__(). This will work every time, no matter what the file-like object really is. It could be a handle to a networking function that is pulling data from a server, or who knows what, and it might not support a .seek() method; but you know that if you just open it again you will get a fresh file handle object. And if someone uses the threading module to run 10 instances of your class in parallel, each one will always get all of the lines from the file, instead of each randomly getting about a tenth of the lines.

Also, I don't recommend your exception handler inside the .next() method in MappedIterator. The .__iter__() method should return an object that can be reliably iterated. If a silly user passes in an integer object (for example: 3), this won't be iterable. Inside .__iter__() you can always explicitly call iter() on an argument, and if it is already an iterator (for example, an open file handle object) you will just get the same object back; but if it is a sequence object, you will get an iterator that works on the sequence. Now if the user passes in 3, the call to iter() will raise an exception that makes sense right at the line where the user passed the 3, rather than the exception coming from the first call to .next(). And as a bonus, you don't need the cnt member variable anymore, and your code will be a little bit faster.

So, if you put together all my suggestions, you might get something like this:

class CSVMapper(object):
    def __init__(self, reader, fname, mapping={}, **kwargs):
        self._reader = reader
        self._fname = fname
        self._mapping = mapping
        self._kwargs = kwargs
        self.line_num = 0

    def __iter__(self):
        cls = type(self)
        obj = cls(self._reader, self._fname, self._mapping, **self._kwargs)
        if "open_with" in self._kwargs:
            open_with = self._kwargs["open_with"]
            f = open_with(self._fname, **self._kwargs)
        else:
            f = open(self._fname, "rt")
        # "itr" is my standard abbreviation for an iterator instance
        obj.itr = obj._reader(f)
        return obj

    def next(self):
        item = self.itr.next()
        self.line_num += 1

        # If no mapping is provided, item is returned unchanged.
        if not self._mapping:
            return item  # csv.reader() returns a list of string values

        # we have a mapping so make a mapped object
        mapped_obj = {}

        key, value = item
        if key in self._mapping:
            return [self._mapping[key], value]
        else:
            return item

if __name__ == "__main__":
    lst_csv = [
        "foo, 0",
        "one, 1",
        "two, 2",
        "three, 3",
    ]

    import csv
    mapping = {"foo": "bar"}
    m = CSVMapper(csv.reader, lst_csv, mapping, open_with=iter)

    for item in m: # will print every item
        print item

    for item in m: # will print every item again
        print item

Now the .__iter__() method gives you a fresh object every time you call it.

Note how the example code uses a list of strings instead of opening a file. In this example, you need to specify an open_with() function to be used instead of the default open() to open the file. Since our list of strings can be iterated to return one string at a time, we can simply use iter as our open_with function here.

I didn't understand your mapping code. csv.reader returns a list of string values, not some kind of a dictionary, so I wrote some trivial mapping code that works for CSV files with two columns, the first one a string. Clearly you should chop out my trivial mapping code and put in the desired mapping code.

Also, I took out your .__len__() method. This returns the length of a sequence when you do something like len(obj); you had it returning line_num which means that the value of len(obj) would change every time you call the .next() method. If users want to know the length, they should store the results in a list and take the length of the list, or something like that.

EDIT: I added **self._kwargs to the call to call_with() in the .__iter__() method. That way, if your call_with() function needs any extra arguments they will be passed through. Before I made this change, there wasn't really a good reason to save the kwargs argument in the object; it would have been just as good to add a call_with argument to the class .__init__() method, with a default argument of None. I think this change is a good one.