[Python-ideas] csv.DictReader could handle headers more intelligently.

[Yuval Greenfield]

On Wed, Jan 23, 2013 at 11:13 PM, J. Cliff Dyer <jcd at sdf.lonestar.org>wrote:

>
> Moreover, I think while it might be expected for a dict to do this, it
> does not follow that a DictReader should be expected to silently throw
> away the user's data.  Just because it uses the dict format for storage
> does not mean that it's okay to throw away user's data silently.  Dicts
> need to be blazingly fast for a host of reasons.  DictReaders do not.
> They're usually dealing with file input, so any slowness in the
> DictReader itself is going to be dwarfed by the file access.  As such we
> can afford to be more programmer-friendly here.
>

If it were a NamedTupleReader, this wouldn't be an issue.

>>> from collections import namedtuple
>>> namedtuple('x', 'a b a c')
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<pyshell#2>", line 1, in <module>
    namedtuple('x', 'a b a c')
  File "C:\Python27\lib\collections.py", line 288, in namedtuple
    raise ValueError('Encountered duplicate field name: %r' % name)
ValueError: Encountered duplicate field name: 'a'
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