How do I write data into CSV format as string (not file)?

Question

I want to cast data like [1,2,\'a\',\'He said \"what do you mean?\"\'] to a CSV-formatted string.

Normally one would use csv.writer() for

Answer 1

I found the answers, all in all, a bit confusing. For Python 2, this usage worked for me:

import csv, io

def csv2string(data):
    si = io.BytesIO()
    cw = csv.writer(si)
    cw.writerow(data)
    return si.getvalue().strip('\r\n')

data=[1,2,'a','He said "what do you mean?"']
print csv2string(data)