csv module strangeness.

[Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch]

In <44f5e870$0$8814$88260bb3 at free.teranews.com>, tobiah wrote:

> I'm trying to create a cvs.reader object using a custom dialect.
> 
> The docs are a little terse, but I gather that I am supposed
> to subclass cvs.Dialect:
> 
> class dialect(csv.Dialect):
>         pass
> 
> Now, the docs say that all of the attributes have reasonable
> defaults, but instantiating the above gives:
> 
> Traceback (most recent call last):
>   File "<stdin>", line 15, in ?
>   File "/usr/local/lib/python2.4/csv.py", line 39, in __init__
>     raise Error, "Dialect did not validate: %s" % ", ".join(errors)
> _csv.Error: Dialect did not validate: delimiter character not set, quotechar not set, lineterminator not set, doublequote parameter must be True or False, skipinitialspace parameter must be True or False, quoting parameter not set
> 
> So I look at the source.  The Dialect class is very simple,
> and starts with:
> 
> class Dialect:
>     _name = ""
>     _valid = False
>     # placeholders
>     delimiter = None
>     quotechar = None
>     escapechar = None
>     doublequote = None
>     skipinitialspace = None
>     lineterminator = None
>     quoting = None
> 
> So, it's no wonder that it fails its validate() call.
> The only thing that I can think of to do is to set
> these on the class itself before instantiation:
> 
> ###############################################
> import csv
> 
> class dialect(csv.Dialect):
>         pass
> 
> dialect.delimiter = "\t"
> dialect.quotechar = '"'
> dialect.lineterminator = "\n"
> dialect.doublequote = True
> dialect.skipinitialspace = True
> dialect.quoting = csv.QUOTE_MINIMAL

That's possible but why didn't you follow the way `csv.Dialect` set the
class attributes?

class MyDialect(csv.Dialect):
    delimiter = '\t'
    lineterminator = '\n'
    # and so on…

Ciao,
	Marc 'BlackJack' Rintsch