Reading from CSV: delimiter must be a string, not unicode

Question

I had a working routine (after a few helpful folks gave me some critical advice in this thread) creating model instances from a CSV file. Up to now I have been using Python

Answer 1

Your default encoding is probably not the most appropriate.

Specify the encoding like this :

dataReader = csv.reader(open(filename), delimiter=str(u';').encode('utf-8'), quotechar=str(u'"').encode('utf-8'))

Answer 2

Happened to me when I switched the code from a file without from __future__ import unicode_literals to one that had it. (python 2.7)

It changed the default encoding for string and messed with the existing code.

Fixed it by changing from:

# worked before using unicode_literals
writer = csv.writer(csvfile, delimiter=';', quotechar='"')  

to

# worked when using unicode_literals
writer = csv.writer(csvfile, delimiter=str(';'), quotechar=str('"'))