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pythoncsvpandasrequest

Pandas read_csv from url

I'm trying to read a csv-file from given URL, using Python 3.x:

import pandas as pd
import requests

url = "https://github.com/cs109/2014_data/blob/master/countries.csv"
s = requests.get(url).content
c = pd.read_csv(s)

I have the following error

"Expected file path name or file-like object, got <class 'bytes'> type"

How can I fix this? I'm using Python 3.4

Solution

  • Update: From pandas 0.19.2 you can now just pass read_csv() the url directly, although that will fail if it requires authentication.

    For older pandas versions, or if you need authentication, or for any other HTTP-fault-tolerant reason:

    Use pandas.read_csv with a file-like object as the first argument.

    • If you want to read the csv from a string, you can use io.StringIO.

    • For the URL https://github.com/cs109/2014_data/blob/master/countries.csv, you get html response, not raw csv; you should use the url given by the Raw link in the github page for getting raw csv response , which is https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cs109/2014_data/master/countries.csv

    Example:

    import pandas as pd
import io
import requests

url = "https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cs109/2014_data/master/countries.csv"
s = requests.get(url).content
c = pd.read_csv(io.StringIO(s.decode('utf-8')))

    Note: in Python 2.x, the string-buffer object was StringIO.StringIO