python pandas read_csv quotechar does not work

Question

I\'ve read this, this and this posts but despite I don\'t know why quotechar does not work at pd.read_csv() (Python 3, pandas 0.18.0 and 0.18.1). A

Answer 1

Another solution is to use a proper regular expression instead of the simple \s+. We need to find comma (,) which is not within quotation marks:

pd.read_csv(file, 
            sep=', (?=(?:"[^"]*?(?: [^"]*)*))|, (?=[^",]+(?:,|$))',
            engine='python')

The expression is taken from here.

Answer 2

Pandas doc on separators in read_csv():

Separators longer than 1 character and different from '\s+' will be interpreted as regular expressions, will force use of the python parsing engine and will ignore quotes in the data.

Try using this instead (sep by default set to a comma):

pd.read_csv(file, skipinitialspace = True, quotechar = '"')