[Tutor] name shortening in a csv module output

[Peter Otten]

Jim Mooney wrote:

> I'm trying the csv module. It all went well until I tried shortening a
> long first name I put in just to exercise things. It didn't shorten. 


> Original file lines:

> Stewartrewqrhjeiwqhreqwhreowpqhrueqwphruepqhruepqwhruepwhqupr|Dorsey|
nec.malesuada at Quisqueporttitoreros.com|Cariboo

> My result:

> Stewartrewqrhjeiwqhreqwhreowpqhrueqwphru Dorsey
 

It did shorten:

>>> len("Stewartrewqrhjeiwqhreqwhreowpqhrueqwphruepqhruepqwhruepwhqupr")
61
>>> len("Stewartrewqrhjeiwqhreqwhreowpqhrueqwphru")
40

>         if len(line[0]) > 40:  # problem here - didn't shorten
>             line[0] = line[0][:40]
>         print("{0:<20s} {1:<20s}".format(line[0], line[1]))

You have to make up your mind if you want to shortend to 40 or 20 chars.

> And I also got weird first characters on the header line. What went wrong?

> Original file lines:
> 
> first_name|last_name|email|city|state or region|address|zip
...

> My result:
> 
> Ï»¿First Name        Last Name           # odd characters on header line
...

Ï»¿

is the UTF-8 BOM (byte order mark) interpreted as Latin 1.

If the input is UTF-8 you can get rid of the BOM with

with open("data.txt", encoding="utf-8-sig") as csvfile:
    ...