Instead of reading the file, let’s say we want to add to it. It will return: The winner in 2004 was Andriy Shevchenko, from Ukraine Step 3: Writing to the File This script iterates through each row until it finds the year we are looking for. Say we want to know the winner of the award in 2004: import csv Using this indexing, we can write a script to output some information. For each row, row is the year, row is the name, and so on. The csv reader allows us to index the values. We will only cover a couple here, but if you are interested in more, check out the Python Documentation. NOTE: The csv reader has lots of functionality that can be used to manipulate the file in all sorts of ways. Because we are working with a csv, this should be a comma. The “delimiter” is a parameter that tells the csv reader what to look for as the separator of each value.

Mvp_winners_reader = csv.reader(file, delimiter=',') Python’s built-in library makes this easy: import csv In order to read this file object, however, we will need to create a csv.reader object. When we open the file, Python’s open() function will return a file object. Now let’s read it! Creating a Reader Object Here’s what our file (winners of the award for best soccer player in the world by year) looks like as a csv: Year,Name,Nationality,Club TeamĢ003,Pavel Nedved,Czech Republic,Juventus With open('mvp_winners.csv', 'r') as file:Īs we begin to write our program, all of our code will go within this text block. We’ll open in read mode for now: import csv

We will want to also specify the mode that we are in - this is signified with an “r” for read-only mode, and a “w” for write mode. The advantage of this is that it will automatically close the file for us when we are done using it, which is important for security reasons in addition to being good coding practice. There are several ways to open files, but my preferred method is the with command, along with the open() function.

While many tutorials gloss over this step, the syntax can be rather confusing for beginners. There are several options for editing csv files in Python, one of which is “ pandas.” This tutorial will focus only on the basic built-in library, but more advanced students might be interested in checking out these other options. csv file, and can be accomplished with a simple command: import csv This will allow us to more easily manipulate the. Before we do anything, let’s make sure to import Python’s built-in csv library at the top of our script.

Reading a csv file python