Splitting Rows in csv on several header rows

Question

I am very new to python, so please be gentle.

I have a .csv file, reported to me in this format, so I cannot do much about it:

ClientAccountID   Acc         


        

Answer 1

If your data was not comma or tab delimited you could use str.split, you can combine it with itertools.groupby to delimit the headers and rows:

from itertools import groupby, izip, imap

with open("test.txt") as f:
    grps, data = groupby(imap(str.split, f), lambda x: x[0] == "ClientAccountID"), []
    for k, v in grps:
        if k:
            names = next(v)
            vals = izip(*next(grps)[1])
            data.append(dict(izip(names, vals)))

from pprint import pprint as pp

pp(data)

Output:

[{'AccountAlias': ('SomeAlias', 'OtherAlias'),
  'ClientAccountID': ('SomeID', 'OtherID'),
  'CurrencyPrimary': ('SomeCurr', 'OtherCurr'),
  'FromDate': ('SomeDate', 'OtherDate')},
 {'AccountAlias': ('SomeAlias', 'OtherAlias', 'AnotherAlias'),
  'AssetClass': ('SomeClass', 'OtherDate', 'AnotherDate'),
  'ClientAccountID': ('SomeID', 'OtherID', 'AnotherID'),
  'CurrencyPrimary': ('SomeCurr', 'OtherCurr', 'AnotherCurr')}]

If it is tab delimited just change one line:

with open("test.txt") as f:
    grps, data = groupby(csv.reader(f, delimiter="\t"), lambda x: x[0] == "ClientAccountID"), []
    for k, v in grps:
        if k:
            names = next(v)
            vals = izip(*next(grps)[1])
            data.append(dict(izip(names, vals)))