Reading a UTF8 CSV file with Python

Question

I am trying to read a CSV file with accented characters with Python (only French and/or Spanish characters). Based on the Python 2.5 documentation for the csvreader (http://

Answer 1

Also checkout the answer in this post: https://stackoverflow.com/a/9347871/1338557

It suggests use of library called ucsv.py. Short and simple replacement for CSV written to address the encoding problem(utf-8) for Python 2.7. Also provides support for csv.DictReader

Edit: Adding sample code that I used:

import ucsv as csv

#Read CSV file containing the right tags to produce
fileObj = open('awol_title_strings.csv', 'rb')
dictReader = csv.DictReader(fileObj, fieldnames = ['titles', 'tags'], delimiter = ',', quotechar = '"')
#Build a dictionary from the CSV file-> {<string>:<tags to produce>}
titleStringsDict = dict()
for row in dictReader:
    titleStringsDict.update({unicode(row['titles']):unicode(row['tags'])})

Answer 2

Python 2.X

There is a unicode-csv library which should solve your problems, with added benefit of not naving to write any new csv-related code.

Here is a example from their readme:

>>> import unicodecsv
>>> from cStringIO import StringIO
>>> f = StringIO()
>>> w = unicodecsv.writer(f, encoding='utf-8')
>>> w.writerow((u'é', u'ñ'))
>>> f.seek(0)
>>> r = unicodecsv.reader(f, encoding='utf-8')
>>> row = r.next()
>>> print row[0], row[1]
é ñ

Python 3.X

In python 3 this is supported out of the box by the build-in csv module. See this example:

import csv
with open('some.csv', newline='', encoding='utf-8') as f:
    reader = csv.reader(f)
    for row in reader:
        print(row)

Answer 3

If you want to read a CSV File with encoding utf-8, a minimalistic approach that I recommend you is to use something like this:

with open(file_name, encoding="utf8") as csv_file:

With that statement, you can use later a CSV reader to work with.

Answer 4

Worth noting that if nothing worked for you, you may have forgotten to escape your path.
For example, this code:

f = open("C:\Some\Path\To\file.csv")

Would result in an error:

SyntaxError: (unicode error) 'unicodeescape' codec can't decode bytes in position 2-3: truncated \UXXXXXXXX escape

To fix, simply do:

f = open("C:\\Some\\Path\\To\\file.csv")

Answer 5

Looking at the Latin-1 unicode table, I see the character code 00E9 "LATIN SMALL LETTER E WITH ACUTE". This is the accented character in your sample data. A simple test in Python shows that UTF-8 encoding for this character is different from the unicode (almost UTF-16) encoding.

>>> u'\u00e9'
u'\xe9'
>>> u'\u00e9'.encode('utf-8')
'\xc3\xa9'
>>> 

I suggest you try to encode("UTF-8") the unicode data before calling the special unicode_csv_reader(). Simply reading the data from a file might hide the encoding, so check the actual character values.

Answer 6

Using codecs.open as Alex Martelli suggested proved to be useful to me.

import codecs

delimiter = ';'
reader = codecs.open("your_filename.csv", 'r', encoding='utf-8')
for line in reader:
    row = line.split(delimiter)
    # do something with your row ...