How to take certain information from a csv list?

Question

I've been tasked with making a program that uses information from a CSV file and extracts the year a student joined the school, the first three letters of the first name and the first two letters of the surname.

This is my current code:

names = []                                                               
with open('Spreadsheet2.csv') as csvfile:
    readCSV = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=',')
    for row in readCSV:
        names.append(row)                                        
print(names)

Sample Output would be:

`[['John', 'Doe', '2018'], ['Edward', 'Kaizak', '2014'], 
 ['Elizabeth', 'Dezir', '2013'], ['Jack', 'Wilder', '2014'], 
 ['Lily', 'Rais', '2015'], ['Ken', 'Lowley', '2015'], 
 ['Edna', 'Bores', '2015'], ['Jacqueline', 'Keis', '2016'], 
 ['Tammy', 'Howst', '2017']]`

I need to write the extracted data to a new CSV file.

Any help is appreciated.

This seems to be a classic file writing operation with/without `csv` module. What have you tried so far? — mad_, Mar 21 '19 at 13:53
I've tried making it print each bit individually so that it can then take what it needs but that doesn't seem to be possible (can't figure out why) — a_dulblade, Mar 21 '19 at 13:56
Spend sometime here https://docs.python.org/3/library/csv.html and if you still have questions feel free to ask. — balderman, Mar 21 '19 at 13:57
Possible duplicate of [How do I read and write CSV files with Python?](https://stackoverflow.com/questions/41585078/how-do-i-read-and-write-csv-files-with-python) — mad_, Mar 21 '19 at 13:59
Hi! Are you having trouble generating the data (taking the first three letters of each name) or just writing it to a file? — bastien girschig, Mar 21 '19 at 14:01

score 0 · Accepted Answer · answered Mar 21 '19 at 14:09

0

Here it is

import csv

new_rows = []
with open('in1.csv', 'r') as f_in:
    reader = csv.reader(f_in, delimiter=',')
    for row in reader:
        new_rows.append([row[0][:3], row[1][:2], row[2]])
    with open('out.csv', 'w',newline='') as f_out:
        writer = csv.writer(f_out, delimiter=',')
        writer.writerows(new_rows)

Input file:

John,Doe,2018
Jack,Smith,2017

Output file:

Joh,Do,2018
Jac,Sm,2017

answered Mar 21 '19 at 14:09

balderman

22,927
7
34
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Thank you for your help. What would you recommend I do to learn python better? – a_dulblade Mar 21 '19 at 14:22
Define small tasks (like that one you did with the csv) and work on the implementation. Use this website only after you did a serious effort to implement the task. – balderman Mar 21 '19 at 14:31

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered Mar 21 '19 at 14:11

0

If your problem is generating the data, you should have a look at python's indexing operator.

Strings are just a list of characters
python has some really neat operator for selecting stuff in lists:

my_string = "hello there"

# first 3 characters
my_string[:3] # 'hel'

# last 5 characters
my_string[-5:] # 'there'

# from 3rd to 5th characters
my_string[3:5] # 'lo'

# last character
my_string[-1] # 'e'

# etc...

Cheers!

answered Mar 21 '19 at 14:11

bastien girschig

663
6
26

Thanks for the help. Sorry if I didn't add much to go off of. – a_dulblade Mar 21 '19 at 14:22
was that what you were looking for? – bastien girschig Mar 21 '19 at 14:23
Its a good push in the right direction. I should be able to use this – a_dulblade Mar 21 '19 at 14:24

How to take certain information from a csv list?

2 Answers2