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# CSV Files

The simplest form for storing spreadsheet data are comma separated values (CSV) in a text file. Each line of a CSV file contains one row of the spreadsheet. The columns are separated by commas and sometimes by another symbol. CSV files may contain column headers in their first line(s).

A typical CSV file looks like that:

    first_name,last_name,town
    John,Miller,Atown
    Ann,Abor,Betown
    Bob,Builder,Cetown
    Nina,Morning,Detown

CSV files are not standardized. Thus, there might be cumbersome deviations from what one expects to be a simple CSV file. The CSV format is used to move data between different sources which cannot read each others native file formats.

In Python we can use the module `csv` for reading data from CSV files. It provides the class `csv.reader`. When creating a `csv.reader` object we have to pass a file object of the CSV file as parameter. The `csv.reader` object then is an iterator object. It yields one line of the CSV file per iteration. More precisely, it yields a list of strings. Each string contains the data from the corresponding column.

See documentation of `csv` module for details.