11.3 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 literal , makes CSV files particularly powerful.
How can we process data in one of the wide varieties of CSV formats?
11.3.1 Getting ready
A summary of a file’s content is called a schema. It’s essential to distinguish between two aspects of a schema.
The physical format of a CSV file’s bytes encode lines of text. For CSV files, 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...
