Recall our CSV file from our last exercise:
users.csv
Name,Username,Email Roger Smith,rsmith,[email protected] Michelle Beck,mlbeck,[email protected] Ashley Barker,a_bark_x,[email protected] Lynn Gonzales,goodmanjames,[email protected]
Even though we can read these lines as text without a problem, there are ways to access the data in a format better suited for programming purposes. In Python we can convert that data into a dictionary using the csv
library’s DictReader
object. Here’s how we’d create a list of the email addresses of all of the users in the above table:
import csv list_of_email_addresses = [] with open('users.csv', newline='') as users_csv: user_reader = csv.DictReader(users_csv) for row in user_reader: list_of_email_addresses.append(row['Email'])
In the above code we first import our csv
library, which gives us the tools to parse our CSV file. We then create the empty list list_of_email_addresses
which we’ll later populate with the email addresses from our CSV. Then we open the users.csv file with the temporary variable users_csv
.
We pass the additional keyword argument newline=''
to the file opening open()
function so that we don’t accidentally mistake a line break in one of our data fields as a new row in our CSV (read more about this in the Python documentation).
After opening our new CSV file we use csv.DictReader(users_csv)
which converts the lines of our CSV file to Python dictionaries which we can use access methods for. The keys of the dictionary are, by default, the entries in the first line of our CSV file. Since our CSV’s first line calls the third field in our CSV “Email
“, we can use that as the key in each row of our DictReader.
When we iterate through the rows of our user_reader
object, we access all of the rows in our CSV as dictionaries (except for the first row, which we used to label the keys of our dictionary). By accessing the 'Email'
key of each of these rows we can grab the email address in that row and append it to our list_of_email_addresses
.
Instructions
Import the csv
module.
Open up the file cool_csv.csv in the temporary variable cool_csv_file
.
Using csv.DictReader
read the contents of cool_csv_file
into a new variable called cool_csv_dict
.
cool_csv.csv includes a cool fact about every person in the CSV.
For each row in cool_csv_dict
print out that row’s "Cool Fact"
.