Using csv module to read ascii delimited text?

Question

You may or may not be aware of ASCII delimited text, which has the nice advantage of using non-keyboard characters for separating fields and lines.

Writing this out

Answer 1

Hey I was struggling with a similar problem all day. I wrote a function heavily inspired by @martineau that should solve it for you. My function is slower but can parse files delimited by any kind of string. Hope it helps!

import csv

def custom_CSV_reader(csv_file,row_delimiter,col_delimiter):

    with open(csv_file, 'rb') as f:

        row = [];
        result = [];
        temp_row = ''
        temp_col = ''
        line = ''
        go = 1;

        while go == 1:
            while go == 1:
                ch = f.read(1)

                if ch == '':  # end of file?
                    go = 0

                if ch != '\n' and ch != '\t' and ch != ',':
                    temp_row = temp_row + ch
                    temp_col = temp_col + ch
                    line = line + ch

                if row_delimiter in temp_row:
                    line = line[:-len(row_delimiter)]

                    row.append(line)

                    temp_row = ''
                    line= ''

                    break

                elif col_delimiter in temp_col:
                    line = line[:-len(col_delimiter)]
                    row.append(line)
                    result.append(row)

                    row = [];
                    temp_col = ''
                    line = ''
                    break
    return result