Installation

pip install backports.csv

Usage

First make sure you’re starting your file off right:

from backports import csv

Then be careful with your files to handle the encoding. If you’re working with a binary file-like object, io.TextIOWrapper can be very helpful. If you’re dealing with a file, you can just use io.open instead of Python 2’s open builtin, and it works just like Python 3’s builtin open.

from backports import csv
import io

def read_csv(filename):
    with io.open(filename, newline='', encoding='utf-8') as f:
        for row in csv.reader(f):
            yield row

def write_csv(filename, rows):
    with io.open(filename, 'w', newline='', encoding='utf-8') as f:
        writer = csv.writer(f)
        for row in rows:
            writer.writerows(row)

Note: It should always be safe to specify newline='', since the csv module does its own (universal) newline handling.