Python Pandas Error tokenizing data

Question

I\'m trying to use pandas to manipulate a .csv file but I get this error:

pandas.parser.CParserError: Error tokenizing data. C error: Expected 2 field

Answer 1

I had this problem as well but perhaps for a different reason. I had some trailing commas in my CSV that were adding an additional column that pandas was attempting to read. Using the following works but it simply ignores the bad lines:

data = pd.read_csv('file1.csv', error_bad_lines=False)

If you want to keep the lines an ugly kind of hack for handling the errors is to do something like the following:

line     = []
expected = []
saw      = []     
cont     = True 

while cont == True:     
    try:
        data = pd.read_csv('file1.csv',skiprows=line)
        cont = False
    except Exception as e:    
        errortype = e.message.split('.')[0].strip()                                
        if errortype == 'Error tokenizing data':                        
           cerror      = e.message.split(':')[1].strip().replace(',','')
           nums        = [n for n in cerror.split(' ') if str.isdigit(n)]
           expected.append(int(nums[0]))
           saw.append(int(nums[2]))
           line.append(int(nums[1])-1)
         else:
           cerror      = 'Unknown'
           print 'Unknown Error - 222'

if line != []:
    # Handle the errors however you want

I proceeded to write a script to reinsert the lines into the DataFrame since the bad lines will be given by the variable 'line' in the above code. This can all be avoided by simply using the csv reader. Hopefully the pandas developers can make it easier to deal with this situation in the future.