How can I read only the header column of a CSV file using Python?

Question

I am looking for a a way to read just the header row of a large number of large CSV files.

Using Pandas, I have this method available, for each csv file:

Answer 1

I might be a little late to the party but here's one way to do it using just the Python standard library. When dealing with text data, I prefer to use Python 3 because unicode. So this is very close to your original suggestion except I'm only reading in one row rather than the whole file.

import csv    

with open(fpath, 'r') as infile:
    reader = csv.DictReader(infile)
    fieldnames = reader.fieldnames

Hopefully that helps!