unicode - Python CSV DictReader with UTF-8 data

Question

AFAIK, the Python (v2.6) csv module can't handle unicode data by default, correct? In the Python docs there's an example on how to read from a UTF-8 encoded file. But this example only returns the CSV rows as a list. I'd like to access the row columns by name as it is done by csv.DictReader but with UTF-8 encoded CSV input file.

Can anyone tell me how to do this in an efficient way? I will have to process CSV files in 100's of MByte in size.

Answer 1

I came up with an answer myself:

def UnicodeDictReader(utf8_data, **kwargs):
    csv_reader = csv.DictReader(utf8_data, **kwargs)
    for row in csv_reader:
        yield {unicode(key, 'utf-8'):unicode(value, 'utf-8') for key, value in row.iteritems()}

_{Note: This has been updated so keys are decoded per the suggestion in the comments}