[Tutor] Writing an "Alt-Enter"

[Kent Johnson]

URBAN LANDREMAN wrote:
> I'm trying to write a .csv file which I can subsequently load into Excel.
> The part that's tripping me up is I want to include an "Alt-Enter" between 
> two of the fields so that when Excel reads the file, it will enter the two 
> fields into the same cell, but on separate lines.
> 
> Is there a way to do it with chr(x) or \nnn or something similar?

An easy experiment answers this. I created an Excel worksheet in this 
format and saved it as csv. The resulting file has a newline in the 
field and it is quoted so the newline is interpreted as part of the data 
rather than the end of a record. Here is the data from the csv file:
A,"B
C",D
E,F,G

One way to write a csv file is with the csv module. It takes care of 
adding quotes around any fields that need them. Here is code to write 
your data using the csv module:

import csv

states = [
     ("MN", "Minnesota","St. Paul"),
     ("WI", "Wisconsin","Madison"),
     ("OH", "Ohio","Columbus"),
]


oFileName = "c:\PythonExport.csv"
ofile = open(oFileName,"wb")
ocsv = csv.writer(ofile)
ocsv.writerow(["State Code","State info"])

for stateCode, state, city in states:
     stateInfo=[stateCode, state + '\n' + city]
     ocsv.writerow(stateInfo)

ofile.close()

Notice that the argument to writerow() is a list of strings, and the 
file must be opened in binary mode ("wb").

Kent