Use Python csv module to merge multiline cells with space or other characters

Question

I wrote a small script in Python to accept a csv file similar to what comes from Excel and output it as a pipe delimited file. When encountering a cell containing multiple lines, it currently adds a backslash (as that is what I specified as the escape character) at the end of the line and continues the cell on the next line. What I want to do though is be able to specify a space character or a string that the new line would be replaced with instead of the backslash and continue the record on the same line. I am having some trouble accomplishing this though. Is there an easy way to do this using the csv module? What I have so far:

fout = open (tfile, "wt")
cout = csv.writer(fout, delimiter = '|', quotechar = '', quoting =     csv.QUOTE_NONE, lineterminator = '\n', escapechar='\\')

cin = csv.reader(fin)

for row in cin:
    cout.writerow(row)

score 0 · Accepted Answer · edited May 23 '17 at 12:06

I worked out the answer to my issue. Instead of using a backslash as the escape character, I use '\n' and then do a find and replace of the new line for every field in each row. I.e.

cout = csv.writer(fout, delimiter = '|', quotechar = '', quoting = csv.QUOTE_NONE, lineterminator = '\n', escapechar='\n')

and

for row in cin:
    newrow = row
    row[:] = [str.replace("\n", " ") for str in row]
    cout.writerow(newrow)

The find and replace of the list is based on the response to How to modify list entries during for loop?

Use Python csv module to merge multiline cells with space or other characters

1 Answers1