[Python-Dev] CSV, bytes and encodings (original) (raw)

Antoine Pitrou solipsis at pitrou.net
Wed Apr 1 12:53:19 CEST 2009

<skip pobox.com> writes:

Antoine> The documentation is, IMO, wrong even in 2.x. Just yesterday I Antoine> had to open a CSV file in 'rU' mode because it had Windows line Antoine> endings and I'm under Linux.... See above. You almost certainly didn't have fields containing CRLF pairs or didn't care that while reading the file your data values were silently altered.

Perhaps. But without using 'rU' the file couldn't be read at all. (I'm not sure it was Windows line endings by the way; perhaps Macintosh ones; anyway, it didn't work using 'rb')

I have to add that if individual fields really can contain newlines, then the CSV module ought to be smarter when /saving/ those fields. I've inadvertently tried to produce a CSV file with such fields and it ended up wrong when opened as a spreadsheet (text after the newlines was ignored in Gnumeric and in OpenOffice, while Excel displayed a spurious additional row containing only the text after the newline).

Regards

Antoine.

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