How to read a CSV without the first column

Question:

I am trying to read a simple CSV file like below, and put its contents in a 2D array:

"","x","y","sim1","sim2","sim3","sim4","sim5","sim6","sim7","sim8","sim9","sim10","sim11","sim12"
"1",181180,333740,5.56588745117188,6.29487752914429,7.4835410118103,5.75873327255249,6.62183284759521,5.81478500366211,4.85671949386597,5.90418815612793,6.32611751556396,6.99649047851562,6.52076387405396,5.68944215774536
"2",181140,333700,6.36264753341675,6.5217604637146,6.16843748092651,5.55328798294067,7.00429201126099,6.43625402450562,6.17744159698486,6.72836923599243,6.38574266433716,6.81451606750488,6.68060827255249,6.14339065551758
"3",181180,333700,6.16541910171509,6.44704437255859,7.51744651794434,5.46270132064819,6.8890323638916,6.46842670440674,6.07698059082031,6.2140531539917,6.43774271011353,6.21923875808716,6.43355655670166,5.90692138671875

To do this, I use this:

data = np.loadtxt("Data/sim.csv", delimiter=',', skiprows=1)

But I always got this message:

"ValueError: could not convert string to float: "1"

I thought the problem was with the first column of each row. So, I tried to read it without the first column, but I couldn’t find out how.

So, how could I ignore the first column? Is there a way to read this file with the first column?

Asked By: pceccon

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Answers:

You can specify a converter for any column.

converters = {0: lambda s: float(s.strip('"')}
data = np.loadtxt("Data/sim.csv", delimiter=',', skiprows=1, converters=converters)

Or, you can specify which columns to use, something like:

data = np.loadtxt("Data/sim.csv", delimiter=',', skiprows=1, usecols=range(1,15))

http://docs.scipy.org/doc/numpy/reference/generated/numpy.loadtxt.html


One way you can skip the first column, without knowing the number of columns, is to read the number of columns from the csv manually. It’s easy enough, although you may need to tweak this on occasion to account for formatting inconsistencies*.

with open("Data/sim.csv") as f:
    ncols = len(f.readline().split(','))

data = np.loadtxt("Data/sim.csv", delimiter=',', skiprows=1, usecols=range(1,ncols+1))

*If there are blank lines at the top, you’ll need to skip them. If there may be commas in the field headers, you should count columns using the first data line instead. So, if you have specific problems, I can add some details to make the code more robust.

Answered By: jmilloy

Trying reading csv file using csv library

import csv

def someFunc(fname):
    with open(fname) as f:
    reader = csv.reader(f)

    i = 0
    header = True
    for row in reader:
        if header:
            header = False
            continue

        out[i] = [row[j] for j in range(len(columns))]
        i += 1
return out

out will have the 2D array.

Answered By: Karthik

You could use pandas and read it as a DataFrame object. If you know the column that you do not want, just add a .drop to the loading line:

a = pandas.read_csv("Data/sim.csv",sep=",")
a = a.drop(a.columns[0], axis=1)

The first row will be read as a header, but you can add a skiprows=1 in the read_csv parameter.
Pandas DataFrames are numpy arrays, so, converting columns or matrices to numpy arrays is pretty straightforward.

Answered By: Deninhos

jmilloy and Deninhos’s answers are both good. If OP specifically wants to read in an NumPy array (as opposed to pandas dataframe), another simplistic alternative is to delete the index column after reading it in. This works when you know the index column is always the first, but number of features (columns) are flexible.

data = np.loadtxt("Data/sim.csv", delimiter=',', skiprows=1)
data = np.delete(data, 0, axis = 1)
Answered By: oustella
with open(filename, 'r') as csvfile:
    csvreader = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=',', quotechar='|')
    for row in csvreader:
        data.append(float(row[1]))
Answered By: user12803044
import pandas

pandas_data = pandas.read_csv('filename', sep=",", header=0,index_col=0) 
Answered By: RAno

This worked for me

import pandas
data = pandas.read_csv("Data/sim.csv",sep=",").iloc[:,1:]
Answered By: Juan Ossa

Read the csv file like this.

df = pd.read_csv('file.csv', usecols=range(1, len(df.columns)))
Answered By: Cooper
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