Ignore character while importing with pandas

Question

I could not find such an option in the documentation. A measuring device spits out everything in Excel:

    <>         


        

Answer 1

I have the same problem. My first line is:

# id ra dec ...

Where # is the commenting-character in Python. import_csv thinks that # is a column header, but it's not. The workaround I used was to define the headers manually:

headerlist = ['id', 'ra', 'dec', ...]  
df = pd.read_csv('data.txt', index_col=False, header=0, names=headerlist)

Note that index_col is optional in regards to this problem.

If there is any option to ignore a certain character in header line, I haven't found it. Hope this solution can be improved upon.