Python CSV parsing not returning proper rows

Question

I\'m new to python and having issues with the CSV parser. Here is the code:

import urllib2
import csv


u = urllib2.urlopen(r\'http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.         


        

Answer 1

Just parse u directly into the reader:

import urllib2
import csv

u = urllib2.urlopen(r'http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=AAPL+GOOG+MSFT&f=nab')

reader = csv.reader(u)

for row in reader:
    print row

The problem is that csv.reader accepts an iterable of lines. When you pass it a string, it thinks each character is a line. In fact, the reason it doesn't just give single-character elements is due the the quotation marks.

u is already an iterable of lines, so it's fine to just pass in.