Sorting a csv file by column

Question

I want to sort the data in a csv file alphabetically according to the contents in the first column. For example, if the file contained:

city/month,Jan,Feb,Mar,Apr

Melbourne,41.2,35.5,37.4,29.3

Brisbane,31.3,40.2,37.9,29

Darwin,34,34,33.2,34.5

it would be sorted as:

city/month,Jan,Feb,Mar,Apr

Brisbane,31.3,40.2,37.9,29

Darwin,34,34,33.2,34.5

Melbourne,41.2,35.5,37.4,29.3

what I've done so far, sorts correctly but it doesn't return the answer correctly, instead of returning it in the table format, it returns everything as a list - any idea why that is?

import csv
import operator

def sort_records(csv_filename, new_filename):

  f = open(csv_filename)

  csv1 = csv.reader(f, delimiter = ',')

  new_filename = sorted(csv1)

  return new_filename

  f.close()

Possible duplicate of http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2089036/sorting-csv-in-python — Ultimater, Sep 27 '15 at 06:06

Ozgur Vatansever · Accepted Answer · 2015-09-27T06:19:46.217

4

>>> import csv
>>> import operator

>>> def sort_records(csv_filename, new_filename):
...     with open(csv_filename, 'r') as i, open(new_filename, 'w') as o:
...         reader = csv.reader(i, delimiter = ',')
...         writer = csv.writer(o, delimiter=',')
...         writer.writerow(next(reader)) # header row
...         writer.writerows(sorted(reader, key=operator.itemgetter(0)))

>>> sort_records('a.csv', 'b.csv')

edited Sep 27 '15 at 06:19

answered Sep 27 '15 at 06:05

Ozgur Vatansever

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I'm getting an attribute error from this: '_csv.reader' object has no attribute 'next' – Saltharion Sep 27 '15 at 06:17

Sorting a csv file by column

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