Deleting rows with Python in a CSV file

Question

All I would like to do is delete a row if it has a value of '0' in the third column. An example of the data would be something like:

6.5, 5.4, 0, 320
6.5, 5.4, 1, 320

So the first row would need to be deleted whereas the second would stay.

What I have so far is as follows:

import csv
input = open('first.csv', 'rb')
output = open('first_edit.csv', 'wb')
writer = csv.writer(output)
for row in csv.reader(input):
    if row[2]!=0:
        writer.writerow(row)
input.close()
output.close()

Any help would be great

Answer 1

You are very close; currently you compare the row[2] with integer 0, make the comparison with the string "0". When you read the data from a file, it is a string and not an integer, so that is why your integer check fails currently:

row[2]!="0":

Also, you can use the with keyword to make the current code slightly more pythonic so that the lines in your code are reduced and you can omit the .close statements:

import csv
with open('first.csv', 'rb') as inp, open('first_edit.csv', 'wb') as out:
    writer = csv.writer(out)
    for row in csv.reader(inp):
        if row[2] != "0":
            writer.writerow(row)

Note that input is a Python builtin, so I've used another variable name instead.

---

Edit: The values in your csv file's rows are comma and space separated; In a normal csv, they would be simply comma separated and a check against "0" would work, so you can either use strip(row[2]) != 0, or check against " 0".

The better solution would be to correct the csv format, but in case you want to persist with the current one, the following will work with your given csv file format:

$ cat test.py 
import csv
with open('first.csv', 'rb') as inp, open('first_edit.csv', 'wb') as out:
    writer = csv.writer(out)
    for row in csv.reader(inp):
        if row[2] != " 0":
            writer.writerow(row)
$ cat first.csv 
6.5, 5.4, 0, 320
6.5, 5.4, 1, 320
$ python test.py 
$ cat first_edit.csv 
6.5, 5.4, 1, 320