Reading a UTF8 CSV file with Python

Question

I am trying to read a CSV file with accented characters with Python (only French and/or Spanish characters). Based on the Python 2.5 documentation for the csvreader (http://

Answer 1

Python 2.X

There is a unicode-csv library which should solve your problems, with added benefit of not naving to write any new csv-related code.

Here is a example from their readme:

>>> import unicodecsv
>>> from cStringIO import StringIO
>>> f = StringIO()
>>> w = unicodecsv.writer(f, encoding='utf-8')
>>> w.writerow((u'é', u'ñ'))
>>> f.seek(0)
>>> r = unicodecsv.reader(f, encoding='utf-8')
>>> row = r.next()
>>> print row[0], row[1]
é ñ

Python 3.X

In python 3 this is supported out of the box by the build-in csv module. See this example:

import csv
with open('some.csv', newline='', encoding='utf-8') as f:
    reader = csv.reader(f)
    for row in reader:
        print(row)