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The goal of this source code is to only print the country population and country name. I'm fairly new to Python and working with CSV's and databases, but I was told in a code review storing the data in a CSV would work better.

Solved: There is another problem as well. When asking for a country, it doesn't matter whether you put in a correct or wrong country, it still counts it as it not being in the list.

Source Code:

import random
import csv

print '\nCountries to choose from are\n'
country_list = []

with open('countries.csv', 'rb') as csvfile:
    countryreader = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=',', quotechar='|')
    for idx, country in enumerate(countryreader):
        print ' '.join(country) # everything besides population and country title should be hidden
        if (idx != 0): # Don't append the fist row (column headers)
            country_list.append(country[0])

startcountry = raw_input('\nWhat country would you like to start in? If you can\'t think of one, you can enter random to choose a random country.').title()

if startcountry == 'Random': # random.sample can be used for more than one country later on
    startcountry = random.choice(country_list)

while startcountry not in country_list:
    startcountry = raw_input('We don\'t know that country. Please enter one from the list above. ')

CSV File:

Country,Population,Type
China,1363560000,Urban
India,1242070000,Rural
United States,317768000,Urban
Indonesia,249866000,Rural
Brazil,201032714,Rural
Pakistan,186015000,Unspecified 
Nigeria,173615000,Unspecified 
Bangladesh,152518015,Unspecified 
Russia,143700000,Rural
Japan,127120000,Urban
Mexico,119713203,Urban
Philippines,99329000,Unspecified 
Vietnam,89708900,Unspecified 
Egypt,86188600,Unspecified 
Germany,80716000,Urban
Iran,77315000,Unspecified 
Turkey,76667864,Unspecified 
Thailand,65926261,Unspecified 
France,65844000,Urban
United Kingdom,63705000,Urban
Italy,59996777,Urban
South Africa,52981991,Unspecified 
South Korea,50219669,Unspecified 
Colombia,47522000,Rural
Spain,46609700,Unspecified 
Ukraine,45410071,Rural
Kenya,44354000,Unspecified 
Argentina,40117096,Rural
Poland,38502396,Rural
Sudan,37964000,Rural
Uganda,35357000,Unspecified 
Canada,35344962,Unspecified 
Iraq,34035000,Unspecified
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tda
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    I see that you are just learning Python. For a "production" project, I would recommend using pandas for CSV parsing and data readout/manipuation/evaluation. You seriously might want to look into it. If this question really is just about learning, then you can ignore that recommendation. – Dr. Jan-Philip Gehrcke May 11 '14 at 21:07
  • For your first question, why don't you actually look at what `country` contains *before* the `join`? For the second, provide more information - what happens instead, and where's the rest of the code? What is in `country_list`? Does the random option work? – jonrsharpe May 11 '14 at 21:14

1 Answers1

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It's because you are using an space as delimiter but your csv file is using commas as delimiters.

Change 

countryreader = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=' ', quotechar='|')

to

countryreader = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=',', quotechar='|')

Anyway, I think you are using the wrong data structure, if you read your CSV file to a dictionary then you can access country names and population easily.

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fasouto
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  • I originally had the CSV as a dictionary but I was told to change it in a Code Review. – tda May 11 '14 at 21:19
  • This does fix my second problem. – tda May 11 '14 at 21:25
  • Well... If you are encouraged not to use dicts I guess you can use a list of tuples but this is harder and less pythonic IMHO. Alternatively you can iterate trough the csv file again but it makes it slower. – fasouto May 11 '14 at 21:30