Handling CSV with Non-Standard Delimiters and Escaped Characters in Python
Quick question that's been bugging me - Hey everyone, I'm running into an issue that's driving me crazy... I'm attempting to read a CSV file that uses a non-standard delimiter (a semicolon `;`) and includes fields with escaped characters (like double quotes within text). Despite using `pandas.read_csv`, I keep working with issues where the data isn't parsed correctly, leading to misaligned columns and incorrect data types. Here's the relevant code snippet: ```python import pandas as pd df = pd.read_csv('data.csv', delimiter=';', escapechar='\') print(df.head()) ``` The CSV file looks something like this: ``` "Name";"Age";"City" "Doe, John";30;"New York, NY" "Smith, Jane";25;"Los Angeles, CA" "O'Connor, Sean";40;"Dublin, Ireland" ``` When I run the code, I get the following output: ``` Name Age City 0 "Doe, John";30;"New York, NY" 1 "Smith, Jane";25;"Los Angeles, CA" 2 "O'Connor, Sean";40;"Dublin, Ireland" ``` As you can see, the entire row is treated as a single string instead of separate columns. I've tried adjusting the `quotechar` parameter, but that hasn’t helped either. Is there a specific way to handle escaped characters and ensure that the delimiter is processed correctly? What best practices should I follow for parsing such CSV files in Pandas? My development environment is macOS. I'd be grateful for any help.