csv reader behavior with None and empty string

Question

I\'d like to distinguishing None and empty strings when going back and forth between Python data structure and csv representation using Python\'s csv

Answer 1

I don't think it would be possible to do what you want with a mere dialect, but you could write your own csv.reader/write subclass. On the other hand, I still think that is overkill for this use case. Even if you want to catch more than just None, you probably just want str():

>>> data = [['NULL/None value',None],['empty string','']]
>>> i = cStringIO.StringIO()
>>> csv.writer(i).writerows(map(str,row) for row in data)
>>> print i.getvalue()
NULL/None value,None
empty string,