portable way to write csv file in python 2 or python 3

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On Windows, I found a python 2 & 3 compliant way of doing it changing csv lineterminator option (which defaults to "\r\n" which makes one \r too many when file is open in text mode in Windows)

import csv

with open("out.csv","w") as f:
    cr = csv.writer(f,delimiter=";",lineterminator="\n")
    cr.writerow(["a","b","c"])
    cr.writerow(["d","e","f"])
    cr.writerow(["a","b","c"])
    cr.writerow(["d","e","f"])

Whatever the python version, that will create a csv file without the infamous “blank lines”.

The only drawback is that on Linux, this method would produce \r-free files, which is maybe not the standard (although files still opens properly in excel, no blank lines and still several lines :))

the problem persists on 3.6.2 (Just checked myself like I should have some time ago)

An alternative is to use a dictionary as arguments:

write_args = {"mode":"wb"} if bytes is str else {"mode":"w","newline":""}

(comparing bytes to str is one of the many ways to tell python 2 from python 3, in python 3 types are different, and it’s very related to our current problem BTW).

Now we can pass those arguments with args unpacking:

with open("out.csv",**write_args) as f:
    cr = csv.writer(f,delimiter=";")

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