Strip white spaces from CSV file

Question

I need to stripe the white spaces from a CSV file that I read

import csv

aList=[]
with open(self.filename, 'r') as f:
    reader = csv.reader(f, delimiter=',', quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONE)
    for row in reader:
        aList.append(row)
    # I need to strip the extra white space from each string in the row
    return(aList)

Answer 1

In my case, I only cared about stripping the whitespace from the field names (aka column headers, aka dictionary keys), when using csv.DictReader.

Create a class based on csv.DictReader, and override the fieldnames property to strip out the whitespace from each field name (aka column header, aka dictionary key).

Do this by getting the regular list of fieldnames, and then iterating over it while creating a new list with the whitespace stripped from each field name, and setting the underlying _fieldnames attribute to this new list.

import csv

class DictReaderStrip(csv.DictReader):
    @property                                    
    def fieldnames(self):
        if self._fieldnames is None:
            # Initialize self._fieldnames
            # Note: DictReader is an old-style class, so can't use super()
            csv.DictReader.fieldnames.fget(self)
            if self._fieldnames is not None:
                self._fieldnames = [name.strip() for name in self._fieldnames]
        return self._fieldnames