如何使用Python从.CSV文件中收集数据？

Question

I am attempting to use the Yahoo! Finance API to gather current stock quotes using Python, a language I am particularly new to. The Yahoo! Finance API appears to offer their data in the form of a .CSV file that can be downloaded.

I am wondering what the best way to use this data is? Is it inefficient to download the file and then read it; is there a method to convert it to a JSON or XML file that I can parse using something like urllib?

The .CSV I am getting is being generated on the following page, in this case the quote for Microsoft (MSFT):

http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=MSFT&f=snl1

Many thanks in advance.

Answer 1

Python has a built in csv module.

http://docs.python.org/library/csv.html

To answer your downloading question:

file = r"http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=MSFT&f=snl1"

import urllib
text = urllib.urlopen(file).read()

>>> print text 
... "MSFT","Microsoft Corpora",29.51

Answer 2

Based on csv module and DictReader , it will be more easy to parse data after urlopen, I reuse the code above from @kreativitea

import csv
import urllib

file = r"http://finance.yahoo.com/d/quotes.csv?s=MSFT&f=snl1"

quotefile = urllib.urlopen(file)
fieldheaders = ["abbr","name","index"]
reader = csv.DictReader(quotefile,fieldnames=fieldheaders)

for row in reader:
    print row

the result is

$ quote.py
{'index': '29.51', 'abbr': 'MSFT', 'name': 'Microsoft Corpora'}

the row in for loop is the hash table, which is easy to deal with