Pandas – pandas.DataFrame.from_csv vs pandas.read_csv

Question:

Answers:

There is no real difference (both are based on the same underlying function), but as noted in the comments, they have some different default values (index_col is 0 or None, parse_dates is True or False for read_csv and DataFrame.from_csv respectively) and read_csv supports more arguments (in from_csv they are just not passed through).

Apart from that, it is recommended to use pd.read_csv.
DataFrame.from_csv exists merely for historical reasons and to keep backwards compatibility (plans are to deprecate it, see here), but all new features are only added to read_csv (as you can see in the much longer list of keyword arguments). Actually, this should be made more clear in the docs.

Answered By: joris

Another difference is that pandas.read_csv is 46x to 490x as fast as pandas.DataFrame.from_csv (in my testing).

I tested it on Python 3.4.4 and pandas 0.19.2 on Windows on my proprietary csv file.

Answered By: ChaimG
Categories: questions Tags: , ,
Answers are sorted by their score. The answer accepted by the question owner as the best is marked with
at the top-right corner.