Trouble reading CSV data into Pandas dataframe (Python/Pandas)

Question

I'm having some trouble reading some csv data into a pandas data frame. Here's what my data looks like:

C1,            C2,              C3,              C4,            C5,  
5.0010254,     12,            0.37,          1.2672,        2039.5,
5.0499756,     12,            0.37,          1.2672,        2039.5,
5.1000244,     12,            0.37,          1.2672,        2039.5,
5.1500122,     12,            0.37,          1.2672,        2039.5,
5.2,           12,            0.37,          1.2672,        2039.5,
5.2499878,     12,            0.37,          1.2672,        2039.5,
5.2999756,     12,            0.37,          1.2672,        2039.5,
5.3500244,     12,            0.37,          1.2672,        2039.5,
5.4000122,     12,            0.37,          1.2672,        2039.5,
5.45,          12,            0.37,          1.2672,        2039.5,
5.4999878,     12,            0.37,          1.2672,        2039.5,

As you can see, the data is comma delimited, but also has a lot of spaces in it after the comma's. I do not know if this is what is causing me trouble, but if I say:

infl = pd.read_csv('filename.txt', sep=",", header=1, na_values=["-999"])
print infl['C2']

I get the error:

KeyError: 'C2'

I have tried the read_csv command with and without explicitly defining the delimiter without success. Any help is appreciated!

Answer 1

One solution is to pass the skipinitialspace argument, to specify that all whitespace after the delimiter should be ignored:

pd.read_csv('filename.txt', sep=",", header=1, na_values=["-999"], skipinitialspace=True)

See the docstring of read_csv for all possible arguments: http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/generated/pandas.read_csv.html