Python CSV DictReader with UTF-8 data

First of all, use the 2.6 version of the documentation. It can change for each release. It says clearly that it doesn’t support Unicode but it does support UTF-8. Technically, these are not the same thing. As the docs say:

The csv module doesn’t directly support reading and writing Unicode, but it is 8-bit-clean save for some problems with ASCII NUL characters. So you can write functions or classes that handle the encoding and decoding for you as long as you avoid encodings like UTF-16 that use NULs. UTF-8 is recommended.

The example below (from the docs) shows how to create two functions that correctly read text as UTF-8 as CSV. You should know that csv.reader() always returns a DictReader object.

import csv

def unicode_csv_reader(unicode_csv_data, dialect=csv.excel, **kwargs):
    # csv.py doesn't do Unicode; encode temporarily as UTF-8:
    csv_reader = csv.DictReader(utf_8_encoder(unicode_csv_data),
                            dialect=dialect, **kwargs)
    for row in csv_reader:
        # decode UTF-8 back to Unicode, cell by cell:
        yield [unicode(cell, 'utf-8') for cell in row]

A classed based approach to @LMatter answer, with this approach you still get all the benefits of DictReader such as getting the fieldnames and getting the line number plus it handles UTF-8

import csv

class UnicodeDictReader(csv.DictReader, object):

    def next(self):
        row = super(UnicodeDictReader, self).next()
        return {unicode(key, 'utf-8'): unicode(value, 'utf-8') for key, value in row.iteritems()}

The csvw package has other functionality as well (for metadata-enriched CSV for the Web), but it defines a UnicodeDictReader class wrapping around its UnicodeReader class, which at its core does exactly that:

class UnicodeReader(Iterator):
    """Read Unicode data from a csv file."""
    […]

    def _next_row(self):
        self.lineno += 1
        return [
            s if isinstance(s, text_type) else s.decode(self._reader_encoding)
            for s in next(self.reader)]

It did catch me off a few times, but csvw.UnicodeDictReader really, really needs to be used in a with block and breaks otherwise. Other than that, the module is nicely generic and compatible with both py2 and py3.

The answer doesn’t have the DictWriter methods, so here is the updated class:

class DictUnicodeWriter(object):

    def __init__(self, f, fieldnames, dialect=csv.excel, encoding="utf-8", **kwds):
        self.fieldnames = fieldnames    # list of keys for the dict
        # Redirect output to a queue
        self.queue = cStringIO.StringIO()
        self.writer = csv.DictWriter(self.queue, fieldnames, dialect=dialect, **kwds)
        self.stream = f
        self.encoder = codecs.getincrementalencoder(encoding)()

    def writerow(self, row):
        self.writer.writerow({k: v.encode("utf-8") for k, v in row.items()})
        # Fetch UTF-8 output from the queue ...
        data = self.queue.getvalue()
        data = data.decode("utf-8")
        # ... and reencode it into the target encoding
        data = self.encoder.encode(data)
        # write to the target stream
        self.stream.write(data)
        # empty queue
        self.queue.truncate(0)

    def writerows(self, rows):
        for row in rows:
            self.writerow(row)

    def writeheader(self):
        header = dict(zip(self.fieldnames, self.fieldnames))
        self.writerow(header)

For me, the key was not in manipulating the csv DictReader args, but the file opener itself. This did the trick:

with open(filepath, mode="r", encoding="utf-8-sig") as csv_file:
    csv_reader = csv.DictReader(csv_file)

No special class required. Now I can open files either with or without BOM without crashing.

That’s easy with the unicodecsv package.

# pip install unicodecsv
import unicodecsv as csv

with open('your_file.csv') as csvfile:
    reader = csv.DictReader(csvfile)
    for row in reader:
        print(row)