Hi!
I am sorry, but still I don't get it!
I am trying with this (the code is attached)
csv_out=csv.writer(open('out1.csv', 'wb'), delimiter=' ',
quoting=csv.QUOTE_ALL, dialect='excel')
and
csv_out=csv.writer(open('out1.csv', 'wb'), dialect='excel-tab')
When I open out1 with text editor, I get 6 columns, but when I open it with
excel I get one column (6 numbers on each cell, how can I separate it it???)
The files from wich I get the columns are txt files.
Many thanks!!
Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2012 00:28:07 -0700
Subject: Re: [Tutor] get columns from txt file
From: [email protected]
To: [email protected]
CC: [email protected]; [email protected]
On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 11:36 PM, susana moreno colomer <[email protected]>
wrote:
Hi!
I am trying this, but still I get 6 numbers per cell. The only one difference
is that I get a comma between numbers instead an space.
I am opening the document also with excel
Many thanks,
Susana
CSV stands for Comma Separated Values. Those commas are the separators between
cells. Your current problem is that a CSV file is just a regular text file
(that happens to have a lot of commas in it), and Excel is trying to read it as
a normal text file.
CSV is about the simplest way ever invented to store tabular data in a file,
but there are some complicating factors. The most obvious is: what happens if
the data you want to store in your file actually contains commas (e.g. address
fields with "city, state zip", or numbers with thousands separators, etc.) One
way around the problem is to put quotes around fields, and then separate the
fields with commas (but then, what if your data contains quotes?); another is
to separate the fields with tab characters instead of commas (technically this
isn't really a CSV file anymore, but the acronym TSV never caught on.)
Excel's native flavor* of CSV is the oldest, simplest, and stupidest of all -
just commas between fields, and newlines between records:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5
a, b, c, d, e
Quotes-and-commas style:
"1", "2", "3", "4,000,000", 5
"a", "b", "c", "Dammit, Janet", "e"
Tab-separated (well, you'll just have to imagine; I don't feel like
reconfiguring my text editor):
1 2 3 4 5
a b cde fghi j
and a bunch of others I can't think of right now.
* Note: Excel will happily import a quotes-and-commas CSV file and display it
normally - but if you export it to CSV, it will revert to the dumb bare-commas
format.
>From the Python csv module docs:
To make it easier to specify the format of input and output records, specific
formatting parameters are grouped together into dialects. A dialect is a
subclass of the Dialect class having a set of specific methods and a single
validate() method.
So you can specify which dialect you want to read or write, and/or you can
specify which delimiter(s) you want to use.
Hope that helps...
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