Technical Details

I’ve wanted to use the python CSV package to read from a string a couple of times now, and I always forget this cheesey little hack so I’m writing it down in the hopes I will be able to find it in the future.

There are a couple of other approaches out there for doing this, but for reading a single line CSV string this is by far the simplest and shortest, perhaps too terse. The more general version of this is to use the following csv.reader( x.split( os.linesep ) ) for multiline csv strings.

x = '1,2,3,"stuff",5'
import csv
csv_reader = csv.reader( [ x ] )
for row in csv_reader
print row
x = '1,2,3,"stuff",5'
import csv
csv_reader = csv.reader( [ x ] )
for row in csv_reader:
    print row

['1', '2', '3', 'stuff', '5']