My CSV file is not registering that I have a string in my code, how can I fix that?-CodePudding

input:

states = ['Michigan', 'California', 'Louisiana']
numbers = ['00','10','00']

my input was concatenated by using

for x,y in zip(states,numbers):
    print(f'{x},{y}')

output:

Michigan,00
California,10
Louisiana,00

this output was saved as a csv file, however when I open the csv file it shows me this:

Michigan 0
California 10
Louisiana 0

shows me this in two separate columns, with states in the first column and numbers in the second column. It is not registering that the numbers are a string and need to be together in the numbers column.

It should instead look like this in the csv file:

Michigan 00
California 10
Louisiana 00

I wrote my data into the csv using:

file_data= ""
for x, y in zip(states,numbers):
    file_data  = f"{x},{y} \n "
    
#create a new file
with open("states_num.csv", "w") as f:
    f.write(file_data)

CodePudding user response：

If you are working with CSV why not to use a module like CSV?

CodePudding user response：

when I open the csv file it shows me this:

Open... In excel? That's not your actual file content since you wrote a comma in your output

There's no type information saved in csv files. Excel therefore decides to read and present data however it can, and you shouldn't rely on a GUI to tell you what's actually in a human readable text file

If you want to save excel files with type information, then don't use a CSV writer

my lists were converted into a string

You don't need that code since you already have two lists of strings that your zip() loop can use to pair the elements

CodePudding user response：

If the numbers in numbers (and thus y) are integers, f"{x},{y} \n " will write them without zero padding.

To write with f-strings and zero-padding, use formatting with a 0-prefix:

file_data= ""
for x, y in zip(states,numbers):
    file_data  = f"{x},{y:02} \n "

where the 2 is the number of places to pad to.

It's also more efficient to collect all lines in a list lines, and and ''.join(lines) in the end instead of using =. = is a little misleading in Python for strings, since it does not really mutate the LHS, but rather creates a new string with the LHS and RHS concatenated.