Reading columns of a csv file with python

I am using python's CSV module to iterate over the rows of a column.

What I need to do is:

1. Get the first row for column "title"
2. Remove any spanish characters (accents, Ñ)
3. Remove single quotes
4. Finally, replace spaces with dashes and convert everything to lowercase.

I got this to work with a simple test file,not a csv. I also managed to print each title in it's own separate line.

But now I'm using this code to go over the CSV file (sorry for the VERY ugly code, I'm a newbie programmer):

import csv
import unicodedata
import ast

def strip_accents(s):
  return ''.join((c for c in unicodedata.normalize('NFD', s) if unicodedata.category(c) != 'Mn'))

dic_read = csv.DictReader(open("output.csv", encoding = "utf8"))

for line in dic_read:

    #print(line)     #I get each line of the csv file as a dictionary.
    #print(line["title"])  # I get only the "title" column on each line

    line = line.replace(' ', '-').lower()
    line = line.replace("´", "")
    line = strip_accents(line)
    fp=open("cleantitles.txt", "a")
    fp.write(line)
    fp.close()

I get the following error:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:/csvreader3.py", line 15, in <module> line = strip_accents(line)
 File "C:/csvreader3.py", line 7, in strip_accents
  return ''.join((c for c in unicodedata.normalize('NFD', s) if unicodedata.category(c) != 'Mn'))
  TypeError: must be str, not dict

I also get a similar error when I try to do a .replace only. I understand now that these methods only apply to strings.

How can I get this to work? I searched around for a way to convert a dict to a string object but that didn't work.

Also, any 开发者_如何学Pythoncriticism to optimize and make my code more readable are also welcome!

---

With the new information at hand, I think you might find this method to be simpler.

Use the inbuilt function 'map'. I'll leave the explanation of what 'map' does to the python documentation.

Here is what I think you should do

Create a function that takes a line/dict and processes it to the format you want

def strip_unwanted(line):
    title = str(line['title']).replace(' ', '-').replace("´", "")
    title = ''.join((c for c in unicodedata.normalize('NFD', s) if unicodedata.category(c) != 'Mn'))
    line['title'] = title
    return line

with open("output.csv", encoding = "utf8") as input:
    dic_entries = csv.DictReader(input)
    # use the 'map' function
    new_entries = map(strip_unwanted, dic_entries)

    with open('some.csv', 'wb') as output:
        writer = csv.DictWriter(output)
        writer.writerows(new_entries)

---

line is a dict. Probably you want to call replace on line['title'].

---

When you have problems with a function try making it output something instead of trying to return it. That way, you can verify that it works and isolate the problem. You have too many statements on one line. That makes it difficult to know where the problem is. Do you realize what a dict is? Of course there is no straightforward way to convert at dict to a string. You need to find out what data you want to keep.

Also, did you mean to make a list comprehension? You should use square brackets then.