How to Read CSV File in Python? | Simplest Method

In this tutorial, I’ll show you how to read CSV files in Python.

What exactly is a CSV file?

CSV stands for “Comma Separated Values”. It is the most basic method of storing tabular data in plain text form. We depend on CSV data in our day-to-day lives as data analyst/ scientists, knowing what and how to work with it is essential.

The name of a CSV file gives away its structure. Normally, a comma is used to separate each data value in a CSV file. That’s how that structure looks:

employee id, name, department
101, Tom, Finance
102, Jack, HR
....

Photo by Mika Baumeister on Unsplash

To be clear, you don’t have to write your own CSV parser. You can utilize a number of libraries that are absolutely suitable. Most scenarios will be covered by the Python csv library. If your task necessitates a large amount of data or numerical analysis, the pandas library also provides CSV parsing capabilities that should take care of the rest.

So let’s get started!

Reading CSV Files With csv

Reading a CSV file with Python’s built-in csv module.

Import the csv library

import csv