CSV (Comma Separated Values) files are the most commonly used file format for importing and exporting big datasets. The reason why a CSV file is preferred over an Excel file is that a CSV file consumes less memory as compared to an Excel file. So while learning data science, you must know how to read and write CSV files. If you want to learn how to read and write CSV files, this article is for you. In this article, I will take you through a tutorial on reading and writing CSV files using Python.
Reading and Writing CSV Files using Python
You can read and write a CSV file without using any Python module or a library. But as we use the pandas library to work with data, this article will teach you how to read and write a CSV file using the pandas library in Python.
So let’s start by writing a CSV file. Here I will first create a sample data using a Python dictionary about the name and age of students, and then I will store that Python dictionary into a CSV file:
# writing a csv file import csv import pandas as pd data = {"Name": ["Aman", "Diksha", "Akanksha", "Sajid", "Akshit"], "Age": [23, 21, 25, 23, 22]} data = pd.DataFrame(data) data.to_csv("age_data.csv", index=False) print(data.head())
Name Age 0 Aman 23 1 Diksha 21 2 Akanksha 25 3 Sajid 23 4 Akshit 22
So this is how you can write a CSV file using Python. Now below is how you can read this CSV file using Python:
# reading a csv file import pandas as pd data = pd.read_csv("age_data.csv") print(data.head())
Name Age 0 Aman 23 1 Diksha 21 2 Akanksha 25 3 Sajid 23 4 Akshit 22
So this is how easy it is to read and write a CSV file using the pandas library in Python.
Summary
So this is how you can read and write CSV files using the Python programming language. CSV files are the most commonly used file format for importing and exporting datasets. So while learning data science, you must know how to read and write CSV files. I hope you liked this article on a tutorial on reading and writing CSV files using Python. Feel free to ask valuable questions in the comments section below.