I'm working with some CSV files, with the following code:
reader = csv.reader(open(filepath, "rU"))
try:
for row in reader:
print 'Row read successfully!', row
except csv.Error, e:
sys.exit('file %s, line %d: %s' % (filename, reader.line_num, e))
And one file is throwing this error:
file my.csv, line 1: line contains NULL byte
What can I do? Google seems to suggest that it may be an Excel file that's been saved as a .csv improperly. Is there any way I can get round this problem in Python?
== UPDATE ==
Following #JohnMachin's comment below, I tried adding these lines to my script:
print repr(open(filepath, 'rb').read(200)) # dump 1st 200 bytes of file
data = open(filepath, 'rb').read()
print data.find('\x00')
print data.count('\x00')
And this is the output I got:
'\xd0\xcf\x11\xe0\xa1\xb1\x1a\xe1\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\x00\ .... <snip>
8
13834
So the file does indeed contain NUL bytes.
As #S.Lott says, you should be opening your files in 'rb' mode, not 'rU' mode. However that may NOT be causing your current problem. As far as I know, using 'rU' mode would mess you up if there are embedded \r in the data, but not cause any other dramas. I also note that you have several files (all opened with 'rU' ??) but only one causing a problem.
If the csv module says that you have a "NULL" (silly message, should be "NUL") byte in your file, then you need to check out what is in your file. I would suggest that you do this even if using 'rb' makes the problem go away.
repr() is (or wants to be) your debugging friend. It will show unambiguously what you've got, in a platform independant fashion (which is helpful to helpers who are unaware what od is or does). Do this:
print repr(open('my.csv', 'rb').read(200)) # dump 1st 200 bytes of file
and carefully copy/paste (don't retype) the result into an edit of your question (not into a comment).
Also note that if the file is really dodgy e.g. no \r or \n within reasonable distance from the start of the file, the line number reported by reader.line_num will be (unhelpfully) 1. Find where the first \x00 is (if any) by doing
data = open('my.csv', 'rb').read()
print data.find('\x00')
and make sure that you dump at least that many bytes with repr or od.
What does data.count('\x00') tell you? If there are many, you may want to do something like
for i, c in enumerate(data):
if c == '\x00':
print i, repr(data[i-30:i]) + ' *NUL* ' + repr(data[i+1:i+31])
so that you can see the NUL bytes in context.
If you can see \x00 in the output (or \0 in your od -c output), then you definitely have NUL byte(s) in the file, and you will need to do something like this:
fi = open('my.csv', 'rb')
data = fi.read()
fi.close()
fo = open('mynew.csv', 'wb')
fo.write(data.replace('\x00', ''))
fo.close()
By the way, have you looked at the file (including the last few lines) with a text editor? Does it actually look like a reasonable CSV file like the other (no "NULL byte" exception) files?
data_initial = open("staff.csv", "rb")
data = csv.reader((line.replace('\0','') for line in data_initial), delimiter=",")
This works for me.
Reading it as UTF-16 was also my problem.
Here's my code that ended up working:
f=codecs.open(location,"rb","utf-16")
csvread=csv.reader(f,delimiter='\t')
csvread.next()
for row in csvread:
print row
Where location is the directory of your csv file.
You could just inline a generator to filter out the null values if you want to pretend they don't exist. Of course this is assuming the null bytes are not really part of the encoding and really are some kind of erroneous artifact or bug.
with open(filepath, "rb") as f:
reader = csv.reader( (line.replace('\0','') for line in f) )
try:
for row in reader:
print 'Row read successfully!', row
except csv.Error, e:
sys.exit('file %s, line %d: %s' % (filename, reader.line_num, e))
I bumped into this problem as well. Using the Python csv module, I was trying to read an XLS file created in MS Excel and running into the NULL byte error you were getting. I looked around and found the xlrd Python module for reading and formatting data from MS Excel spreadsheet files. With the xlrd module, I am not only able to read the file properly, but I can also access many different parts of the file in a way I couldn't before.
I thought it might help you.
Converting the encoding of the source file from UTF-16 to UTF-8 solve my problem.
How to convert a file to utf-8 in Python?
import codecs
BLOCKSIZE = 1048576 # or some other, desired size in bytes
with codecs.open(sourceFileName, "r", "utf-16") as sourceFile:
with codecs.open(targetFileName, "w", "utf-8") as targetFile:
while True:
contents = sourceFile.read(BLOCKSIZE)
if not contents:
break
targetFile.write(contents)
Why are you doing this?
reader = csv.reader(open(filepath, "rU"))
The docs are pretty clear that you must do this:
with open(filepath, "rb") as src:
reader= csv.reader( src )
The mode must be "rb" to read.
http://docs.python.org/library/csv.html#csv.reader
If csvfile is a file object, it must be opened with the ‘b’ flag on platforms where that makes a difference.
appparently it's a XLS file and not a CSV file as http://www.garykessler.net/library/file_sigs.html confirm
Instead of csv reader I use read file and split function for string:
lines = open(input_file,'rb')
for line_all in lines:
line=line_all.replace('\x00', '').split(";")
I got the same error. Saved the file in UTF-8 and it worked.
This happened to me when I created a CSV file with OpenOffice Calc. It didn't happen when I created the CSV file in my text editor, even if I later edited it with Calc.
I solved my problem by copy-pasting in my text editor the data from my Calc-created file to a new editor-created file.
I had the same problem opening a CSV produced from a webservice which inserted NULL bytes in empty headers. I did the following to clean the file:
with codecs.open ('my.csv', 'rb', 'utf-8') as myfile:
data = myfile.read()
# clean file first if dirty
if data.count( '\x00' ):
print 'Cleaning...'
with codecs.open('my.csv.tmp', 'w', 'utf-8') as of:
for line in data:
of.write(line.replace('\x00', ''))
shutil.move( 'my.csv.tmp', 'my.csv' )
with codecs.open ('my.csv', 'rb', 'utf-8') as myfile:
myreader = csv.reader(myfile, delimiter=',')
# Continue with your business logic here...
Disclaimer:
Be aware that this overwrites your original data. Make sure you have a backup copy of it. You have been warned!
I opened and saved the original csv file as a .csv file through Excel's "Save As" and the NULL byte disappeared.
I think the original encoding for the file I received was double byte unicode (it had a null character every other character) so saving it through excel fixed the encoding.
For all those 'rU' filemode haters: I just tried opening a CSV file from a Windows machine on a Mac with the 'rb' filemode and I got this error from the csv module:
Error: new-line character seen in unquoted field - do you need to
open the file in universal-newline mode?
Opening the file in 'rU' mode works fine. I love universal-newline mode -- it saves me so much hassle.
I encountered this when using scrapy and fetching a zipped csvfile without having a correct middleware to unzip the response body before handing it to the csvreader. Hence the file was not really a csv file and threw the line contains NULL byte error accordingly.
Have you tried using gzip.open?
with gzip.open('my.csv', 'rb') as data_file:
I was trying to open a file that had been compressed but had the extension '.csv' instead of 'csv.gz'. This error kept showing up until I used gzip.open
One case is that - If the CSV file contains empty rows this error may show up. Check for row is necessary before we proceed to write or read.
for row in csvreader:
if (row):
do something
I solved my issue by adding this check in the code.
This may be a redundant question because I know that I can rename the file and solve the issue, but I'm still pretty new at this and it would be really useful information for the future. Thanks in advance to respondents!
So, I have a CSV file which is a table exported from SQL with the filename "t_SQLtable" located in a sub-folder of my working directory.
In order to open the file in Pandas I use the following command:
SQLfile= pd.read_csv('SUBFOLDER\t_SQLtable.csv', sep=',')
This is the error I receive:
FileNotFoundError: [Errno 2] File SUBFOLDER _SQLtable.csv does not exist: 'SUBFOLDER\t_SQLtable.csv'
My understanding is that Pandas is reading the <\t> as a tab and thus is not able to find the file, because that's not the file name it is looking for. But I don't know how to format the text in order to tell Pandas how to recognize the <t> as part of the filename. Would anyone know how to resolve this?
Thank you!
Folders are navigated using / which won't escape any character
SQLfile= pd.read_csv('SUBFOLDER/t_SQLtable.csv', sep=',')
in future if you want to keep \t without it being considered as tab
use raw string
print('SUBFOLDER\t_SQLtable.csv')
print(r'SUBFOLDER\t_SQLtable.csv')
SUBFOLDER _SQLtable.csv
SUBFOLDER\t_SQLtable.csv
Try with this.
SQLfile= pd.read_csv('SUBFOLDER\\t_SQLtable.csv', sep=',')
SQLfile= pd.read_csv('SUBFOLDER/t_SQLtable.csv', sep=',')
If doesn't work , then try this:
import os
file_path = os.path.join(os.getcwd(), "SUBFOLDER", "t_SQLtable.csv")
SQLfile= pd.read_csv(file_path, sep=',')
Simply do what you did before, except add an r right before the string:
SQLfile = pd.read_csv(r'SUBFOLDER\t_SQLtable.csv', sep=',')
Adding r to the start of a string will make python treat it as a raw string, as in, all escape codes won't be evaluated.
I am looping through a directory with CSV files, reading them using pandas' read_csv.
Some of these files will be empty (only headers), so i get the following error:
CParserError: Passed header=1 but only 1 lines in file
Though i am sure there is a better way, my first instinct is to handle the error, as follows:
try:
v = pd.read_csv(strPath, header = 1)
except CParserError:
return
But this causes the following error:
NameError: name 'CParserError' is not defined
Your advice is greatly appreciated.
So I've got about 5008 rows in a CSV file, a total of 5009 with the headers. I'm creating and writing this file all within the same script. But when i read it at the end, with either pandas pd.read_csv, or python3's csv module, and print the len, it outputs 4967. I checked the file for any weird characters that may be confusing python but don't see any. All the data is delimited by commas.
I also opened it in sublime and it shows 5009 rows not 4967.
I could try other methods from pandas like merge or concat, but if python wont read the csv correct, that's no use.
This is one method i tried.
df1=pd.read_csv('out.csv',quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONE, error_bad_lines=False)
df2=pd.read_excel(xlsfile)
print (len(df1))#4967
print (len(df2))#5008
df2['Location']=df1['Location']
df2['Sublocation']=df1['Sublocation']
df2['Zone']=df1['Zone']
df2['Subnet Type']=df1['Subnet Type']
df2['Description']=df1['Description']
newfile = input("Enter a name for the combined csv file: ")
print('Saving to new csv file...')
df2.to_csv(newfile, index=False)
print('Done.')
target.close()
Another way I tried is
dfcsv = pd.read_csv('out.csv')
wb = xlrd.open_workbook(xlsfile)
ws = wb.sheet_by_index(0)
xlsdata = []
for rx in range(ws.nrows):
xlsdata.append(ws.row_values(rx))
print (len(dfcsv))#4967
print (len(xlsdata))#5009
df1 = pd.DataFrame(data=dfcsv)
df2 = pd.DataFrame(data=xlsdata)
df3 = pd.concat([df2,df1], axis=1)
newfile = input("Enter a name for the combined csv file: ")
print('Saving to new csv file...')
df3.to_csv(newfile, index=False)
print('Done.')
target.close()
But not matter what way I try the CSV file is the actual issue, python is writing it correctly but not reading it correctly.
Edit: Weirdest part is that i'm getting absolutely no encoding errors or any errors when running the code...
Edit2: Tried testing it with nrows param in first code example, works up to 4000 rows. Soon as i specify 5000 rows, it reads only 4967.
Edit3: manually saved csv file with my data instead of using the one written by the program, and it read 5008 rows. Why is python not writing the csv file correctly?
I ran into this issue also. I realized that some of my lines had open-ended quotes, which was for some reason interfering with the reader.
So for example, some rows were written as:
GO:0000026 molecular_function "alpha-1
GO:0000027 biological_process ribosomal large subunit assembly
GO:0000033 molecular_function "alpha-1
and this led to rows being read incorrectly. (Unfortunately I don't know enough about how csvreader works to tell you why. Hopefully someone can clarify the quote behavior!)
I just removed the quotes and it worked out.
Edited: This option works too, if you want to maintain the quotes:
quotechar=None
My best guess without seeing the file is that you have some lines with too many or not enough commas, maybe due to values like foo,bar.
Please try setting error_bad_lines=True. From Pandas documentation: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/generated/pandas.read_csv.html to see if it catches lines with errors in them, and my guess is that there will be 41 such lines.
error_bad_lines : boolean, default True
Lines with too many fields (e.g. a csv line with too many commas) will by default cause an exception to be raised, and no DataFrame will be returned. If False, then these “bad lines” will dropped from the DataFrame that is returned. (Only valid with C parser)
The csv.QUOTE_NONE option seems to not quote fields and replace the current delimiter with escape_char + delimiter when writing, but you didn't paste your writing code, but on read it's unclear what this option does. https://docs.python.org/3/library/csv.html#csv.Dialect