These seems like something very simple, but search as I might I just can\'t get past it.
I have a CSV file like this:
Day,Event,Value
1,\"Rent\",500
cr = csv.reader(open("file.csv","rb"))
cr.next() # to skip the header
total = 0
for row in cr:
total += int(row[2])
# possibly do other things with data/rows
print total
There are more terse ways (e.g., list comprehension, or generator expressions) to do this, but this provides the basic idea and also lets you do other things with each line as needed (as pointed out by @MarkRansom too)