Reading delimited files with the CSV module
One commonly used data format is comma-separated values (CSV). We can generalize this to think of the comma character as simply one of many candidate separator characters. For example, a CSV file can use the | character as the separator between columns of data. This generalization for separators other than the comma makes CSV files particularly powerful.
How can we process data in one of the wide varieties of CSV formats?
Getting ready
A summary of a file's content is called a schema. It's essential to distinguish between two aspects of the schema.
The physical format of the file: For CSV, this means the file's bytes encode text. The text is organized into rows and columns using a row separator character (or characters) and a column separator character. Many spreadsheet products will use ,(comma) as the column separator and the \r\n sequence of characters as the row separator. The specific combination of punctuation...
