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

[Shane Green]

Well, my objection to doing it automatically was based in part on not being familiar with the common scenarios you've brought up, but the other reasons I had in mind were that it seemed like the kind of thing that might also be indicative of an error–something wrong with the data someone might want to know was happening rather than have masked; and also because discarding such rows leaves a question about the delimiter: it's now known, but knowing it based on rows we've discarded seems unclean.  





Shane Green 
www.umbrellacode.com
805-452-9666 | shane at umbrellacode.com

On Jan 24, 2013, at 8:08 AM, "J. Cliff Dyer" <jcd at sdf.lonestar.org> wrote:

> On Thu, 2013-01-24 at 07:28 -0800, Shane Green wrote:
>> Since every form of CSV file counts EOL as a line terminator, I think
>> discarding empty lines preceding the headers is arguably acceptable,
>> but do not think discarding lines of just delimiters would be.  What
>> about extending the DictReader API so it was easy to perform these
>> actions explicitly, such as being able to discard() the field names to
>> be re-evaluated on the next line?
> 
> I think I like this idea.  There's something a little distasteful about
> making the user manually delve into the underlying reader, but this
> makes it more user-friendly and more obvious how to proceed.
> 
> For clarity's sake, what is your objection to discarding lines of
> delimiters?  The reason I suggest doing it is that it is a common output
> situation when exporting Excel files or LibreCalc files that have a
> blank row at the top.
> 
> Cheers,
> Cliff
> 
> 

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