Output result to csv file - TypeError writerow() takes 2 positional arguments but 5 were given

Question

I'm trying to output my spaCy NER results to a csv file rather than a plain text file.

So far I have this code to try and achieve that:

def spacy_ner():
    with open("spacy_results.txt", "w") as f:

        cf = csv.DictWriter(f, ['Character', 'begin', 'end'\
                                , 'Label'], extrasaction='ignore')
        cf.writeheader()

        nlp = spacy.load('en_core_web_md')
        doc = nlp(text)

        for ent in doc.ents:
            if ent.label_ == 'PERSON':
                cf.writerow(ent.text, ent.start_char, ent.end_char, ent.label_)
        print("Processing done")

I'm not sure how to create the csv file, while trying to display all the attributes mentioned above: ent.text, ent.start_char, ent.end_char, ent.label_

Running the code above calls a TypeError: writerow() takes 2 positional arguments but 5 were given

It works fine if I write the result to a .txt file, but it would be nice if it was a more structred and easy to access csv file.

What am I not seeing here that I need to change? Any help would be great!

Answer 1

A csv.DictWriter requires a dictionary for writing. If your ent object doesn't have a to_dict() method, you will have to make one.

    for ent in doc.ents:
        if ent.label_ == 'PERSON':
            d = {'Character':ent.text, 'begin':ent.start_char,
                 'end':ent.end_char,'Label':ent.label_}
            cf.writerow(d)