Read CSV file with comma within fields in Python

Question

I need to read a CSV file which has fields that have a comma, so I have double quoted the fields which contains commas, such as:

1, \"text1,text2\", \"text3,         


        

Answer 1

The Python csv module actually does support quoted fields, even by default. Your problem here is that Python by default does not skip the space, so you need to use skipinitialspace=True.

>>> s = StringIO.StringIO('1, "text1,text2", "text3, text4", a, b, c')
>>> list(csv.reader(s, skipinitialspace=True))
[['1', 'text1,text2', 'text3, text4', 'a', 'b', 'c']]