Pandas Dataframes: CSV Quoting and Escaping Strategies

WIP Alert This is a work in progress. Current information is correct but more content may be added in the future.

Using pandas v. 1.0.3

Idempotent read and write

Must Quote nonnumeric, backslash for escaping

This is a safe pattern for most use cases:

• Sample CSV structure:

  "column1","column2"
  "foo bar", 2
  "text with \"text within quotes\" foo", 3,
  "text with back \ slashes in the middle",  4
  

• TO WRITE

  import csv
  import pandas as pd
  
  df = # build dataframe here
  
  df.to_csv(
      "/path/to/output/file.csv",
      quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONNUMERIC,
      escapechar="\\",
      doublequote=False,
      index=False)
  

• TO READ

  import pandas as pd
  
  df = pd.read_csv(
      "/path/to/output/file.csv",
      escapechar="\\")