Prevent double quotes in lists of list when reading and writing csv files in pandas dataframe

Question

Before reading / writing into csv file, when performing the command below on the original pandas dataframe

   user
0  [mary, jane]
1  [alex, andrew]

When doing the command ->

df['user'].to_list()

My output looks normal and does not have the weird double-quotes.

[['mary', 'jane'], ['alex', 'andrew']]

After writing and reading into csv file, my output changed to look like the following with the weird double quotes when performing the same command, how can I maintain the original pandas dataframe without the additional double quotes in my lists when reading/writing csv files?

df = pd.read_csv('users.csv')
df['user'].to_list()

Weird Output ->

["['mary', 'jane']", "['alex', 'andrew']"]

My dataframe also changes to look like this now

   user
0  ['mary', 'jane']
1  ['alex', 'andrew']

The code that I used to write and read the dataframe is as follow.

df.to_csv('users.csv')
df = pd.read_csv('users.csv')

I am not sure why is this weird change happening. Any insight is appreciated.

Thank you.

Answer 1

While writing into csv, following code can be used in order to remove double quotes. This parameter is an inbuilt feature of df.to_csv()

df.to_csv('users.csv',index=False,header= False,sep = ',', quoting = csv.QUOTE_NONE, escapechar = ' ')

Hope it helps !