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This article explains how to read a CSV into a list in Python.

Suppose we have a CSVfile Employees.csvwith the following content.

If you open this file with a text editor, its contents should look like this.

Id,Name,Department,email,Salary
1,Sam,Human Resource,sam@gmail.com,65K
2,John,Management,john@gmail.com,58K
3,Tonny,IT,tonny@gmail.com,70K
4,Mike,Accounts,mike@gmail.com,35K

Now we will import the above data from this CSV file into a list in Python.

csv.readerRead CSV into a list in Python using

Python has a built-in CSVmodule called which has a reader class to read the contents of a CSV file. The sample code to read CSV to list in Python is as follows.

from csv import reader

with open("Employees.csv", "r") as csv_file:
    csv_reader = reader(csv_file)
    # Passing the cav_reader object to list() to get a list of lists
    list_of_rows = list(csv_reader)
    print(list_of_rows)

csv_reader = reader(csv_file)Pass the file object csv_fileto csv.reader()the function and get readerthe object. It returns an iterator to iterate over all the rows of the CSV file.

list_of_rows = list(csv_reader)Converts csv.readera object to a list where each element in the list represents a row of the CSV and each item in the list represents a cell or column in a row.

Output:

[['Id', 'Name', 'Company', 'email', 'Salary'], 
['1', 'Sam', 'Human Resource', 'sam@gmail.com', '65K'], 
['2', 'John', 'Management', 'john@gmail.com', '58K'], 
['3', 'Tonny', 'IT', 'tonny@gmail.com', '70K'], 
['4', 'Mike', 'Accounts', 'mike@gmail.com', '35K']]

csv.readerRead CSV into a list in Python using and other delimiters

csv.readerThe function also provides an option to read text files where the values ​​are separated by other characters than commas. For example, the delimiter can be a tab or a space. To read such a file, we need to pass an additional parameter delimiterto the reader function. See the following example.

If we have a file Employees_TSV.csvwith the same content as in Employees.csv, but separated by tabs instead of commas.

from csv import reader

with open("Employees_TSV.csv", "r") as csv_file:
    csv_reader = reader(csv_file, delimiter="\t")
    list_of_rows = list(csv_reader)
    print(list_of_rows)

In the above code we are reading data from a file of values ​​separated by tabs. delimiter = '\t'The delimiter in the specified CSV file is the tab character.

The output of this code is the same as above.