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copied!<h2>Comma-separated values</h2> <p>The file format you're describing is simply the CSV format. Take a tour on Wikipedia and search "Comma-separated values".</p> <p>With Python, you can use the <code>csv</code> package. Go to <a href="http://docs.python.org/2/library/csv.html" rel="nofollow">http://docs.python.org/2/library/csv.html</a> to see the documentation.</p> <p>The simplest way of writing a CSV file is as follow:</p> <pre><code>import csv records = [[1951, 'Superman and the Mole Men', 'DC Comics', 'Lee Sholem'], [1966, 'Batman', 'DC Comics', 'Leslie H. Martinson'], [2002, 'Spider-Man', 'Marvel Comics', 'Sam Raimi'], [2008, 'Iron Man', 'Marvel Comics', 'Jon Favreau']] with open('heros.csv', 'wb') as fp: writer = csv.writer(fp) writer.writerows(records) </code></pre> <p>The result is a classic CSV file:</p> <pre><code>1951,Superman and the Mole Men,DC Comics,Lee Sholem 1966,Batman,DC Comics,Leslie H. Martinson 2002,Spider-Man,Marvel Comics,Sam Raimi 2008,Iron Man,Marvel Comics,Jon Favreau </code></pre> <p>Of course, you can add the header:</p> <pre><code>with open('heros.csv', 'wb') as fp: writer = csv.writer(fp) writer.writerows([['Year', 'Film', 'Publisher', 'Director']]) writer.writerows(records) </code></pre> <p><strong>note:</strong> the header is a list of list (look at the double brackets)</p> <p>The result is the following CSV file:</p> <pre><code>Year,Film,Publisher,Director 1951,Superman and the Mole Men,DC Comics,Lee Sholem 1966,Batman,DC Comics,Leslie H. Martinson 2002,Spider-Man,Marvel Comics,Sam Raimi 2008,Iron Man,Marvel Comics,Jon Favreau </code></pre> <h2>Reading an HTML table</h2> <p>First of all, use a <code>with</code> statement to open a file in secured manner.</p> <p>For example, to read a text file, process as follow:</p> <pre><code>with open('sample.txt', 'r') as fp: content = fp.read() </code></pre> <p>That way, if an error occurs during reading, the file will be automatically closed at the end of the <code>with</code> statement, before the exception is raised. Nothing is left opened!</p> <p>To read an HTML table with <code>BeautifulSoup</code> (which I don't know), you can do:</p> <pre><code>with open("/company/a/searches/a") as html_file: soup = BeautifulSoup(html_file) rows = soup.findAll("table", {"id": "cos"}) records = [] for tr in rows: record = [] cols = tr.findAll('td') for td in cols: record.append(td.contents[0]) records.append(record) </code></pre> <p>The <code>records</code> list will contains the entire table. You can then write it into a CSV file.</p> <h2>Handling UNICODE values</h2> <p>HTML doesn't contains ASCII strings but UNICODE string and I suppose that <code>td.contents[0]</code> will return an <code>unicode</code> instance.</p> <p>But, the <code>csv</code> module doesn’t directly support reading and writing Unicode. So, you will need to write <code>unicode</code> string using <code>UTF-8</code> encoding during your CSV serialization. I recommend you to look at the <code>unicode_csv_reader()</code> function in the example: <a href="http://docs.python.org/2/library/csv.html#examples" rel="nofollow">http://docs.python.org/2/library/csv.html#examples</a>.</p>

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