What is the pythonic way to read CSV file data as rows of namedtuples?

Question

What is the best way to take a data file that contains a header row and read this row into a named tuple so that the data rows can be accessed by header name?

I was attempting something like this:

import csv
from collections import namedtuple

with open('data_file.txt', mode="r") as infile:
    reader = csv.reader(infile)
    Data = namedtuple("Data", ", ".join(i for i in reader[0]))
    next(reader)
    for row in reader:
        data = Data(*row)

The reader object is not subscriptable, so the above code throws a TypeError. What is the pythonic way to reader a file header into a namedtuple?

Answer 1

Use:

Data = namedtuple("Data", next(reader))

and omit the line:

next(reader)

Combining this with an iterative version based on martineau's comment below, the example becomes for Python 2

import csv
from collections import namedtuple
from itertools import imap

with open("data_file.txt", mode="rb") as infile:
    reader = csv.reader(infile)
    Data = namedtuple("Data", next(reader))  # get names from column headers
    for data in imap(Data._make, reader):
        print data.foo
        # ...further processing of a line...

and for Python 3

import csv
from collections import namedtuple

with open("data_file.txt", newline="") as infile:
    reader = csv.reader(infile)
    Data = namedtuple("Data", next(reader))  # get names from column headers
    for data in map(Data._make, reader):
        print(data.foo)
        # ...further processing of a line...