Track 8 · Lesson 5 of 11

Reading CSV files

Read spreadsheet-style CSV data with csv.reader and csv.DictReader, handle headers, quoting and delimiters, and convert text fields to numbers.

You will be able to

• Explain why splitting lines on commas breaks on real CSV files
• Read rows with csv.reader and skip or use the header row
• Read records as dictionaries with csv.DictReader and look up columns by name
• Convert CSV fields, which are always strings, to int and float
• Read files that use a different delimiter, such as semicolons