Python click argument to define delimiter causes CSV error "delimiter" must be a 1-character string

Question

I am trying to build a simple click command line application to read in a file with one type of delimiter and write out the same file with a different delimiter. I don't want to do something like find-and-replace, as there are possibly some properly escaped delimiters inside of columns that I do not want to touch.

I wrote a simple click-based CLI to do this, but I'm having some problems passing in the \t to create a tab-delimited file.

As seen by the error below, the tab delimiter is not getting properly passing into the pandas function to write out the new file. Everything looks right when I print out the delimiters in the middle of the CLI, so I'm not sure what's going on here.

import click
import pandas as pd

@click.command()
@click.argument('filename')
@click.argument('in_delimiter')
@click.argument('out_delimiter')
def cli(filename, in_delimiter, out_delimiter):

    """
    Command line interface to change file delimiters
    """

    # read in CSV file
    df = pd.read_csv(filename, sep=in_delimiter)
    print(len(df))

    # write out CSV file
    df.to_csv('output.csv', sep=out_delimiter, index=False)
    print("transformation complete")


if __name__ == '__main__':
    cli()

This is how I'm passing my input and output delimiters into the CLI:

python cli.py data.csv "," "\t"

This is the error that is generated:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "cli.py", line 24, in <module>
    cli()
  File "/home/curtis/Program_Files/miniconda3/envs/py36/lib/python3.6/site-packages/click/core.py", line 722, in __call__
    return self.main(*args, **kwargs)
  File "/home/curtis/Program_Files/miniconda3/envs/py36/lib/python3.6/site-packages/click/core.py", line 697, in main
    rv = self.invoke(ctx)
  File "/home/curtis/Program_Files/miniconda3/envs/py36/lib/python3.6/site-packages/click/core.py", line 895, in invoke
    return ctx.invoke(self.callback, **ctx.params)
  File "/home/curtis/Program_Files/miniconda3/envs/py36/lib/python3.6/site-packages/click/core.py", line 535, in invoke
    return callback(*args, **kwargs)
  File "cli.py", line 19, in cli
    df.to_csv('output.csv', sep=out_delimiter, index=False)
  File "/home/curtis/Program_Files/miniconda3/envs/py36/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pandas/core/frame.py", line 1745, in to_csv
    formatter.save()
  File "/home/curtis/Program_Files/miniconda3/envs/py36/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pandas/io/formats/csvs.py", line 169, in save
    self.writer = UnicodeWriter(f, **writer_kwargs)
  File "/home/curtis/Program_Files/miniconda3/envs/py36/lib/python3.6/site-packages/pandas/io/common.py", line 521, in UnicodeWriter
    return csv.writer(f, dialect=dialect, **kwds)
TypeError: "delimiter" must be a 1-character string

See also https://stackoverflow.com/questions/4020539. This is not quite a duplicate because the specific context requires integrating a callback that will do the unescaping, rather than doing it directly. — Karl Knechtel, Aug 04 '22 at 23:36

score 3 · Accepted Answer · edited Sep 04 '22 at 08:09

To process the escaped characters, you can use a callback like this:

###Code:

import codecs

def unescape(ctx, param, value):
    return codecs.getdecoder("unicode_escape")(value)[0]

To use the callback you can do:

@click.argument('escaped', callback=unescape)

###How does this work

This will process the passed in string using the unicode_escape codec.

(Source)

###Test Code:

import click

@click.command()
@click.argument('escaped', callback=unescape)
def cli(escaped):
    click.echo('len: {}, ord: {}'.format(len(escaped), ord(escaped)))


if __name__ == "__main__":
    commands = (
        r'\t',
        r'\n',
        '\t',
        ',',
        '--help',
    )

    import sys, time

    time.sleep(1)
    print('Click Version: {}'.format(click.__version__))
    print('Python Version: {}'.format(sys.version))
    for cmd in commands:
        try:
            time.sleep(0.1)
            print('-----------')
            print('> ' + cmd)
            time.sleep(0.1)
            cli(cmd.split())

        except BaseException as exc:
            if str(exc) != '0' and \
                    not isinstance(exc, (click.ClickException, SystemExit)):
                raise

###Results:

Click Version: 6.7
Python Version: 3.6.3 (v3.6.3:2c5fed8, Oct  3 2017, 18:11:49) [MSC v.1900 64 bit (AMD64)]
-----------
> \t
len: 1, ord: 9
-----------
> \n
len: 1, ord: 10
-----------
>   
Usage: test.py [OPTIONS] ESCAPED

Error: Missing argument "escaped".
-----------
> ,
len: 1, ord: 44
-----------
> --help
Usage: test.py [OPTIONS] ESCAPED

Options:
  --help  Show this message and exit.

Python click argument to define delimiter causes CSV error "delimiter" must be a 1-character string

1 Answers1