Modern Python Standard Library Cookbook

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CSV files are plain text files, with a few limitations. For example, nothing tells us how a newline should be encoded (\r\n or \n) and nothing tells us which encoding should be used, utf-8 or ucs-2. In theory, CSV doesn't even state that it must be comma-separated; a lot of software will write it separated by : or ;.

That's why you should pay attention to the encoding provided to the open function when reading CSV files. In our example, we knew for sure that utf8 was used, because we wrote the file ourselves, but in other cases, there would be no guarantee that any specific encoding was used.

In case you are not sure how the CSV file is formatted, you can try to use the csv.Sniffer object, which, when applied to the text contained ...