parsing empty file with no columns

Question

I have a function that reads a text file and then parses it into a data frame.

Usually the input file will be something like this:

A   B   M
1   2   100
         


        

Answer 1

Just eat the exception and make an empty df:

def read_data(file):
    try:
        df = pd.read_csv(file, delim_whitespace=True)
    except pandas.io.common.EmptyDataError:
        df = pd.DataFrame()

    return df

Answer 2

There are ways you can validate that a file is empty or formatted incorrectly. However, you can also just catch the exception and return an empty data frame.

from pandas.io.common import EmptyDataError

def read_data(file):
    try:
        df = pd.read_csv(file, delim_whitespace=True)
    except EmptyDataError:
        df = pd.DataFrame()

    return df