[Tut] Python Convert Markdown Table to CSV

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Python Convert Markdown Table to CSV

5/5 – (1 vote)

Problem

Given the following Markdown table stored in

Code:

'my_file.md'

:

Code:

| 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | |-------|-----|------|------|------| | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | 0 | | 5 | 4 | 3 | 2 | 1 | | alice | bob | carl | dave | emil |

Python Challenge: How to convert the Markdown table to a CSV file

Code:

'my_file.csv'

?



Solution

To convert a Markdown table

Code:

.md

file to a CSV file in Python, first read the Markdown table file by using the

Code:

f.readlines()

method on the opened file object

Code:

f

, by splitting along the markdown table separator symbol

Code:

'|'

. Clean up the resulting list (row-wise) and add all rows to a single list of lists. Then create a DataFrame from the list of lists and use the

Code:

DataFrame.to_csv()

method to write it to a CSV file.

An example is shown in the following script that you can use for your own conversion exercise by replacing only the in-file and out-file names highlighted below:

Code:

import pandas as pd # Convert the Markdown table to a list of lists with open('my_file.md') as f: rows = [] for row in f.readlines(): # Get rid of leading and trailing '|' tmp = row[1:-2] # Split line and ignore column whitespace clean_line = [col.strip() for col in tmp.split('|')] # Append clean row data to rows variable rows.append(clean_line) # Get rid of syntactical sugar to indicate header (2nd row) rows = rows[:1] + rows[2:] print(rows) df = pd.DataFrame(rows) df.to_csv('my_file.csv', index=False, header=False)

The resulting CSV file

Code:

'my_file.csv'

:

Code:

1,2,3,4,5 0,0,0,0,0 5,4,3,2,1 alice,bob,carl,dave,emil

Learn More

Background Tutorials: The code uses a multitude of Python features. Check out these articles to learn more about them:

• Python
  Code:

  open()
  function
  
  
• Python slicing
  
  
• Python List Comprehension
  
  
• Python List
  Code:

  append()
  Method
  
  
• Python List Concatenation
  
  
• Python Create DataFrame
  
  
• Python Pandas
  Code:

  to_csv()
  Method