Reading file error in Python

Question

I am brand new to Python and am having a terrible time trying to read in a .csv file to work with. The code I am using is the following:

>>> dat = open('blue.csv','r')
>>> print dat()
Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "<stdin>", line 1, in <module>
TypeError: 'file' object is not callable

Could anyone help me diagnose this error or lend any suggestions on how to read the file in? Sorry if there is an answer to this question already, but I couldn't seem to find it.

Answer 1

You need to use read in order to read a file

dat = open('blue.csv','r')
print dat.read()

Alternatively, you can use with for self-closing

with open('blue.csv','r') as o:
    data = o.read()

Answer 2

You can read the file:

dat = open('blue.csv', 'r').read()

Or you can open the file as a csv and read it row by row:

import csv
infile = open('blue.csv', 'r')
csvfile = csv.reader(infile)
for row in csvfile:
    print row
    column1 = row[0]
    print column1

Check out the csv docs for more options for working with csv files.