One of the more important things I need to attend to is reading a CSV file and examining it. While there is a plethora of documentation on this, since this is my blog I’m documenting my most used cases.
dfOriginalCSV = pd.read_csv("csvFile.csv", sep=",", dtype=str, keep_default_na=False, encoding='utf-8')
So the file is csvFile.csv, while we don’t have to declare it the sep provides the separator character in case of those pesky pipes. By declaring the dtype of str we’re saying the whole thing is a string so it doesn’t do odd tricks with numbers. The keep default na suppresses pythons overwhelming desire to put nan into anything that doesn’t seem like a proper value and of course always account for the encoding.
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