Reading tab-delimited file with Pandas - works on Windows, but not on Mac

Question

I\'ve been reading a tab-delimited data file in Windows with Pandas/Python without any problems. The data file contains notes in first three lines and then follows with a he

Answer 1

The biggest clue is the rows are all being returned on one line. This indicates line terminators are being ignored or are not present.

You can specify the line terminator for csv_reader. If you are on a mac the lines created will end with \rrather than the linux standard \n or better still the suspenders and belt approach of windows with \r\n.

pandas.read_csv(filename, sep='\t', lineterminator='\r')

You could also open all your data using the codecs package. This may increase robustness at the expense of document loading speed.

import codecs

doc = codecs.open('document','rU','UTF-16') #open for reading with "universal" type set

df = pandas.read_csv(doc, sep='\t')

Answer 2

Another option would be to add engine='python' to the command pandas.read_csv(filename, sep='\t', engine='python')