Problem with Python CSV putting each letter in new field

I'm trying to put a list of URLs into a csv file that I'm scraping from a webpage using urllib2 and BeautifulSoup. I have tried writing the links to a csv file as unicode and also converted to utf-8. In both cases, each letter is inserted into a new field.

Here's my code (I've tried it at least these two ways):

f = open('filename','wb')
w = csv.writer(f,delimiter=',')
for link in links:
    w.writerow(link['href'])

And:

f = open('filename','wb')
w = csv.writer(f,delimiter=',')
for link in links:
    w.writerow(link['href'].encode('utf-8'))

links is a list that looks like this:

[<a href="#Flyout1" accesskey="2" class="quicklinks" tabindex="1" title="Skip to content">Quick Links: Skip to main page content</a>, <a href="#search" class="quicklinks" tabindex="1" title="Skip to search">Skip to Search</a>, <a href="#News" class="quicklinks" tabindex="1" title="Skip to Section table of contents">Skip to Section Content Menu</a>, <a href="#footer" class="quicklinks" tabindex="1" title="Skip to site options">Skip to Common Links</a>, <a href="http://www.hhs.gov"><img src="/ucm/groups/fdagov-public/@system/documents/system/img_fdagov_hhs_gov.png" alt="www.hhs.gov link" style="width:112px; height:18px;" border="0" /></a>]

Not all the links have an 'href' key but I check for that in code not shown 开发者_如何学Gohere. In both cases, the correct strings are written to the csv file, but each letter is in a new field.

Any thoughts?

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From the docs: "A row must be a sequence of strings or numbers ..." You are passing a single string, not a sequence of strings, so it treats each letter as an item. Put your string in a list.

So change w.writerow(link['href']) to w.writerow([link['href']]).

Note: A csv file with a single column looks exactly like a flat text file. Maybe you don't need csv.

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I think by "each letter inserted into a new field" you mean something like this, right?

h,t,t,p,:,/,/,w,w,w,.,g,o,o,g,l,e,.,c,o,m

If so, then writerow() is iterating over the characters in your string, and interpreting those as distinct columns. Try using writerow([link['href']]) instead.

Edit: Looks like @Steven Rumbalski beat me to the punch on this!

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According to the docs, writerow() takes an iterable object and, iterating over it, prints out the CSV representation of it. Your problem is a string is an iterable object. If I have:

mystring = 'foo'

Python will let me iterate over like so:

for c in mystring:
    print c

And I'll get:

f
o
o

That's a handy feature, but it's working against you in this case.

You don't want writerow() to itterate over the string, you want it to itterate over a list of strings -- separating the strings by commas, not the characters. In that case you'll want to make a list out of the strings like so:

w.writerow([link['href']])