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://docs.python.org/library/csv.html), I came up with the following code to read the CSV file since the csvreader supports only ASCII.
def unicode_csv_reader(unicode_csv_data, dialect=csv.excel, **kwargs):
# csv.py doesn't do Unicode; encode temporarily as UTF-8:
csv_reader = csv.reader(utf_8_encoder(unicode_csv_data),
dialect=dialect, **kwargs)
for row in csv_reader:
# decode UTF-8 back to Unicode, cell by cell:
yield [unicode(cell, 'utf-8') for cell in row]
def utf_8_encoder(unicode_csv_data):
for line in unicode_csv_data:
yield line.encode('utf-8')
filename = 'output.csv'
reader = unicode_csv_reader(open(filename))
try:
products = []
for field1, field2, field3 in reader:
...
Below is an extract of the CSV file I am trying to read:
0665000FS10120684,SD1200IS,Appareil photo numérique PowerShot de 10 Mpx de Canon avec trépied (SD1200IS) - Bleu
0665000FS10120689,SD1200IS,Appareil photo numérique PowerShot de 10 Mpx de Canon avec trépied (SD1200IS) - Gris
0665000FS10120687,SD1200IS,Appareil photo numérique PowerShot de 10 Mpx de Canon avec trépied (SD1200IS) - Vert
...
Even though I try to encode/decode to UTF-8, I am still getting the following exception:
Traceback (most recent call last):
File ".\Test.py", line 53, in <module>
for field1, field2, field3 in reader:
File ".\Test.py", line 40, in unicode_csv_reader
for row in csv_reader:
File ".\Test.py", line 46, in utf_8_encoder
yield line.encode('utf-8', 'ignore')
UnicodeDecodeError: 'ascii' codec can't decode byte 0xc3 in position 68: ordinal not in range(128)
How do I fix this?
This question is related to
python
utf-8
csv
character-encoding
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.
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.
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 ...
The link to the help page is the same for python 2.6 and as far as I know there was no change in the csv module since 2.5 (besides bug fixes). Here is the code that just works without any encoding/decoding (file da.csv contains the same data as the variable data). I assume that your file should be read correctly without any conversions.
test.py:
## -*- coding: utf-8 -*-
#
# NOTE: this first line is important for the version b) read from a string(unicode) variable
#
import csv
data = \
"""0665000FS10120684,SD1200IS,Appareil photo numérique PowerShot de 10 Mpx de Canon avec trépied (SD1200IS) - Bleu
0665000FS10120689,SD1200IS,Appareil photo numérique PowerShot de 10 Mpx de Canon avec trépied (SD1200IS) - Gris
0665000FS10120687,SD1200IS,Appareil photo numérique PowerShot de 10 Mpx de Canon avec trépied (SD1200IS) - Vert"""
# a) read from a file
print 'reading from a file:'
for (f1, f2, f3) in csv.reader(open('da.csv'), dialect=csv.excel):
print (f1, f2, f3)
# b) read from a string(unicode) variable
print 'reading from a list of strings:'
reader = csv.reader(data.split('\n'), dialect=csv.excel)
for (f1, f2, f3) in reader:
print (f1, f2, f3)
da.csv:
0665000FS10120684,SD1200IS,Appareil photo numérique PowerShot de 10 Mpx de Canon avec trépied (SD1200IS) - Bleu
0665000FS10120689,SD1200IS,Appareil photo numérique PowerShot de 10 Mpx de Canon avec trépied (SD1200IS) - Gris
0665000FS10120687,SD1200IS,Appareil photo numérique PowerShot de 10 Mpx de Canon avec trépied (SD1200IS) - Vert
Had the same problem on another server, but realized that locales are messed.
export LC_ALL="en_US.UTF-8"
fixed the problem
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")
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
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)
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'])})
Source: Stackoverflow.com