python - Trailing delimiter confuses pandas read_csv

Question

A csv (comma delimited) file, where lines have an extra trailing delimiter, seems to confuse pandas.read_csv. (The data file is [1])

It treats the extra delimiter as if there's an extra column. So there's one more column than what headers require. Then pandas.read_csv takes the first column as row labels. The overall effect is that columns and headers are not aligned any more - the first column becomes row labels, the second column is named by first header, etc.

It is quite annoying. Any idea how to tell pandas.read_csv do the right thing? I couldn't find one.

Great book, BTW.

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[1]: 2012 FEC Election Database from chapter 9 of the book Python for Data Analysis

Answer 1

For everyone who is still finding this. Wes wrote a blogpost about this. The problem if there is one value too many in the row it is treated as the rows name.

This behaviour can be changed by setting index_col=False as an option to read_csv.