Trailing delimiter confuses pandas read_csv

Question

A csv (comma delimited) file, where lines have an extra trailing delimiter, seems to confuse pandas.read_csv. (The data file is [1])

It treats the extra

Answer 1

I created a GitHub issue to have a look at handling this issue automatically:

https://github.com/pydata/pandas/issues/2442

I think the FEC file format changed slightly causing this annoying issue-- if you use the one posted here http://github.com/pydata/pydata-book you hopefully won't have that problem.

Answer 2

For everyone who is still finding this. Wes wrote a blogpost about this. The problem if there is one value too many in the row it is treated as the rows name.

This behaviour can be changed by setting index_col=False as an option to read_csv.

Answer 3

Well, there's a very simple workaround. Add a dummy column to the header when reading csv file in:

cols = ...
cols.append('')
records = pandas.read_csv('filename.txt', skiprows=1, names=cols)

Then columns and header get aligned again.