Python _csv.Error: line contains NUL for a new CSV file

Question

I tried to print some records off "the file" in csv format, but it keeps showing the error in Title. Yes i tried to change encoding to utf8, utf-16, as well as utf-16-le using notepad++. it still doesn't work. Please help :c

This is the input code:

import csv
f=open("thefile.csv", 'r', encoding="ansi")
reader=csv.reader(f)
covaxin=0
covishield=0


c1="Covaxin"
c2="Covishield"
a="41 - 60 years"


for row in reader:
   if (row[3]==a):
      for bro in reader:
         if (bro[4]==c1):
            covaxin+=1
            print("Covaxin: ", covaxin)
         elif (bro[4]==c2):
            covishield+=1
            print("Covishield:", covishield)
         else:
            print("error")
         

f.close()  

and this is the output:

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:\Users\admin\Desktop\Reader Program.py", line 13, in <module>
    for row in reader:
_csv.Error: line contains NUL

Answer 1

The error message means that the cvs module is reading a NUL character from the file, ie a character with code 0. The most obvious reasons for that would be that the file actually contains such a character (which means that the file is broken), or that the file is encoded with a 16-bit encoding (such as UTF-16) but you are reading it with an 8-bit encoding (which would make every second character a NUL character, assuming the file keeps to the English alphabet). You must find out what encoding the file is in, and give the appropriate parameter to open . To check whether there is a NUL character even with the proper encoding chosen, you could read the entire file as a string and use Python's string manipulation functions to search for '\' characters.

This thread has several potentially useful code snippets and hints for looking at what's in the file.

Interestingly, it looks like this error will be gone in a future version of Python.