python - pandas read csv with extra commas in column

Question

I'm reading a basic csv file where the columns are separated by commas with these column names:

userid, username, body

However, the body column is a string which may contain commas. Obviously this causes a problem and pandas throws out an error:

CParserError: Error tokenizing data. C error: Expected 3 fields in line 3, saw 8

Is there a way to tell pandas to ignore commas in a specific column or a way to go around this problem?

Answer 1

Imagine we're reading your dataframe called comma.csv:

userid, username, body
01, n1, 'string1, string2'

One thing you can do is to specify the delimiter of the strings in the column with:

df = pd.read_csv('comma.csv', quotechar="'")

In this case strings delimited by ' are considered as total, no matter commas inside them.