avoid accessing wrong column in csv

Avoid accessing wrong column in csv

I was parsing few csv files. All were from same provider. Format isDate, Name, Email, Company, City etc in one file. I made an assumption all the downloaded files are in the same format. For my surprise few files had same format and others din’t.

with open(filename, 'rb') as f:
    reader = csv.reader(f)
    reader.next() # first row contains column names
    for row in reader:
        name, email, company = row[1], row[2], row[3]
        #save to db

In the above code the fundamental mistake is fixing the position of the columns in csv file. What happens if email and company position is interchanged? In simple screwed.

How can I avoid these situations ?

 with open(filename, 'rb') as f:
     reader = csv.reader(f)
     header = reader.next() #reader is not list
     name_pos, email_pos, company_pos =          header.index("Name"),header.index("Email"),header.index("Company")

 with open(filename, 'rb') as f:
     reader = csv.reader(f)
     reader.next()
     for row in reader:
         name, email, company = row[name_pos], row[email_pos], row[company_pos]
         #save to db

The code is bit longer here, but robost. The above snippet doesn’t rely on column position but only relies on column name in the first line. Ofcourse header.index will raise ValueError you can wrap the exception. First all the required column positions are retrieved, file is reopened, first row is omitted and other details are accessed.

csv python tip

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