Adam Freeland
Adam Freeland

Reputation: 45

write string list into csv using python

I am trying to put a list of string into csv, but in the output csv each letter is separated by comma. Is there a way to fix this?

from urllib2 import urlopen    
import csv
from scrapy.selector import Selector
def make_soup(url):
    data_text = urlopen(url).read()
    hxs = Selector(text=data_text)
    return hxs

hxs = make_soup("http://propinfo.co.lincoln.or.us/property-search?search=+NW+3RD+ST")
act = hxs.xpath('//*[@id="block-system-main"]/div[2]/div/div[2]/table/tbody/tr/td/a/text()').extract()



with open("accounts.csv", "wb") as f1:
    writer = csv.writer(f1)
    writer.writerows(act)

Upvotes: 0

Views: 300

Answers (1)

tdelaney
tdelaney

Reputation: 77337

Printing act shows that you have a list of strings [u'M14422', u'M28900', u'M33698', ...]. writerows treats each string in the list as a row, and that means that each character in the string is a column. That's why you end up with comma-separated characters in the finel csv.

The solution is to put each string into its own list so that the row is a list with a single column.

from urllib2 import urlopen
import csv
from scrapy.selector import Selector
def make_soup(url):
    data_text = urlopen(url).read()
    hxs = Selector(text=data_text)
    return hxs

hxs = make_soup("http://propinfo.co.lincoln.or.us/property-search?search=+NW+3RD+ST")
act = hxs.xpath('//*[@id="block-system-main"]/div[2]/div/div[2]/table/tbody/tr/td/a/text()')

with open("accounts.csv", "wb") as f1:
    writer = csv.writer(f1)
    for row in act:
        writer.writerow([row])

Upvotes: 2

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