[Tutor] get columns from txt file

[susana moreno colomer]

Hi!
I am sorry, but still I don't get it!
I am trying with this (the code is attached)
 
csv_out=csv.writer(open('out1.csv', 'wb'), delimiter=' ', quoting=csv.QUOTE_ALL, dialect='excel')
and 
csv_out=csv.writer(open('out1.csv', 'wb'), dialect='excel-tab')
 
When I open out1 with text editor, I get 6 columns, but when I open it with excel I get one column (6 numbers on each cell, how can I separate it it???)
 
The files from wich I get the columns are txt files.
 
Many thanks!!



Date: Fri, 13 Jul 2012 00:28:07 -0700
Subject: Re: [Tutor] get columns from txt file
From: marc.tompkins at gmail.com
To: susana_87 at hotmail.com
CC: dfjennings at gmail.com; tutor at python.org


On Thu, Jul 12, 2012 at 11:36 PM, susana moreno colomer <susana_87 at hotmail.com> wrote:



Hi!
I am trying this, but still I get 6 numbers per cell. The only one difference is that I get a comma between numbers instead an space. 
I am opening the document also with excel
Many thanks, 
Susana


CSV stands for Comma Separated Values.  Those commas are the separators between cells.  Your current problem is that a CSV file is just a regular text file (that happens to have a lot of commas in it), and Excel is trying to read it as a normal text file. 

CSV is about the simplest way ever invented to store tabular data in a file, but there are some complicating factors.  The most obvious is: what happens if the data you want to store in your file actually contains commas (e.g. address fields with "city, state zip", or numbers with thousands separators, etc.)  One way around the problem is to put quotes around fields, and then separate the fields with commas (but then, what if your data contains quotes?); another is to separate the fields with tab characters instead of commas (technically this isn't really a CSV file anymore, but the acronym TSV never caught on.)  

Excel's native flavor* of CSV is the oldest, simplest, and stupidest of all - just commas between fields, and newlines between records:
1, 2, 3, 4, 5
a, b, c, d, e

Quotes-and-commas style:
"1", "2", "3", "4,000,000", 5
"a", "b", "c", "Dammit, Janet", "e"

Tab-separated (well, you'll just have to imagine; I don't feel like reconfiguring my text editor):
1       2       3      4      5
a      b      cde     fghi    j

and a bunch of others I can't think of right now.
* Note: Excel will happily import a quotes-and-commas CSV file and display it normally - but if you export it to CSV, it will revert to the dumb bare-commas format.

>From the Python csv module docs:

To make it easier to specify the format of input and output records, specific formatting parameters are grouped together into dialects. A dialect is a subclass of the Dialect class having a set of specific methods and a single validate() method. 


So you can specify which dialect you want to read or write, and/or you can specify which delimiter(s) you want to use.

Hope that helps... 


 		 	   		  
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