Writing with Python's built-in .csv module

Question

[Please note that this is a different question from the already answered How to replace a column using Python’s built-in .csv writer module?]

I need to do a find and rep

Answer 1

Opening csv files as binary is just wrong. CSV are normal text files so You need to open them with

source = open("PALTemplateData.csv","r")
target = open("AnotherFile.csv","w")

The error

_csv.Error: iterator should return strings, not bytes (did you open the file in text mode?)

comes because You are opening them in binary mode.

When I was opening excel csv's with python, I used something like:

try:    # checking if file exists
    f = csv.reader(open(filepath, "r", encoding="cp1250"), delimiter=";", quotechar='"')
except IOError:
    f = []

for record in f:
    # do something with record

and it worked rather fast (I was opening two about 10MB each csv files, though I did this with python 2.6, not the 3.0 version).

There are few working modules for working with excel csv files from within python - pyExcelerator is one of them.