How to get CSV reader to read a memory file?

Question

I'm trying to fetch an entire file into memory (done - using StringIO) - but these objects don't really behave exactly like 'real' files as far as I can see - I get the whole contents, or I can read a line at a time, but I can't work out how to apply this pattern: ``` import csv with open(#MYMEMORYFILE_HERE#, 'rb') as csvfile: spamreader = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=' ', quotechar='|') for row in spamreader: ``` Is there a way of treating a memoryfile just like an on-disk file , so I can use the nicer idioms above ? ``` Python 2.7.4 (default, Apr 19 2013, 18:28:01) ``` EDIT: Thanks for the answers on this - I think I have narrowed down what was confusing me...but I still have an issue here, the following doesn't output anything? I suspect flushing ? ``` from csv import reader, writer import StringIO memfile=StringIO.StringIO() spamwriter = writer(memfile) spamwriter.writerow(['Spam'] * 5 + ['Baked Beans']) spamwriter.writerow(['Spam', 'Lovely Spam', 'Wonderful Spam']) spamreader=re…

Accepted Answer

If you want to read a whole file into memory, and it's text, you don't need to open a StringIO object. Just read it as a string!

```
with open(filename, 'r') as file:
    in_memory_file = file.read()
```

Then you can use `splitlines` to iterate over it the way you would iterate over an open text file.

```
spamreader = csv.reader(in_memory_file.splitlines(), delimiter=' ', quotechar='|')
for row in spamreader:
    pass
```

How to get CSV reader to read a memory file?

Solution

Problem