How do I write data into CSV format as string (not

Question

I want to cast data like [1,2,'a','He said "what do you mean?"'] to a CSV-formatted string.

Normally one would use csv.writer() for this, because it handles all the crazy edge cases (comma escaping, quote mark escaping, CSV dialects, etc.) The catch is that csv.writer() expects to output to a file object, not to a string.

My current solution is this somewhat hacky function:

def CSV_String_Writeline(data):
    class Dummy_Writer:
        def write(self,instring):
            self.outstring = instring.strip("\r\n")
    dw = Dummy_Writer()
    csv_w = csv.writer( dw )
    csv_w.writerow(data)
    return dw.outstring

Can anyone give a more elegant solution that still handles the edge cases well?

Edit: Here's how I ended up doing it:

def csv2string(data):
    si = StringIO.StringIO()
    cw = csv.writer(si)
    cw.writerow(data)
    return si.getvalue().strip('\r\n')

Answer 1

import csv
from StringIO import StringIO
with open('file.csv') as file:
    file = file.read()

stream = StringIO(file)

csv_file = csv.DictReader(stream)

Answer 2

Since your example only has one row of data, you could simply use

input = [1,2,'a','He said "what do you mean?"']
output = ",".join(str(x) for x in input)

Obviously, if the input data has a more complex form such as a dictionary or 2d array, this simple answer would become more complex.

Answer 3

In Python 3:

>>> import io
>>> import csv
>>> output = io.StringIO()
>>> csvdata = [1,2,'a','He said "what do you mean?"',"Whoa!\nNewlines!"]
>>> writer = csv.writer(output, quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONNUMERIC)
>>> writer.writerow(csvdata)
59
>>> output.getvalue()
'1,2,"a","He said ""what do you mean?""","Whoa!\nNewlines!"\r\n'

Some details need to be changed a bit for Python 2:

>>> output = io.BytesIO()
>>> writer = csv.writer(output)
>>> writer.writerow(csvdata)
57L
>>> output.getvalue()
'1,2,a,"He said ""what do you mean?""","Whoa!\nNewlines!"\r\n'

Answer 4

Here's the version that works for utf-8. csvline2string for just one line, without linebreaks at the end, csv2string for many lines, with linebreaks:

import csv, io

def csvline2string(one_line_of_data):
    si = BytesIO.StringIO()
    cw = csv.writer(si)
    cw.writerow(one_line_of_data)
    return si.getvalue().strip('\r\n')

def csv2string(data):
    si = BytesIO.StringIO()
    cw = csv.writer(si)
    for one_line_of_data in data:
        cw.writerow(one_line_of_data)
    return si.getvalue()

Answer 5

I found the answers, all in all, a bit confusing. For Python 2, this usage worked for me:

import csv, io

def csv2string(data):
    si = io.BytesIO()
    cw = csv.writer(si)
    cw.writerow(data)
    return si.getvalue().strip('\r\n')

data=[1,2,'a','He said "what do you mean?"']
print csv2string(data)

Answer 6

You could use StringIO instead of your own Dummy_Writer:

This module implements a file-like class, StringIO, that reads and writes a string buffer (also known as memory files).

There is also cStringIO, which is a faster version of the StringIO class.