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<div class="section" id="s-outputting-csv-with-django">
<span id="outputting-csv-with-django"></span><h1>Outputting CSV with Django<a class="headerlink" href="#outputting-csv-with-django" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h1>
<p>This document explains how to output CSV (Comma Separated Values) dynamically
using Django views. To do this, you can either use the <a class="reference external" href="http://docs.python.org/library/csv.html">Python CSV library</a> or
the Django template system.</p>
<div class="section" id="s-using-the-python-csv-library">
<span id="using-the-python-csv-library"></span><h2>Using the Python CSV library<a class="headerlink" href="#using-the-python-csv-library" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>Python comes with a CSV library, <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">csv</span></tt>. The key to using it with Django is
that the <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">csv</span></tt> module’s CSV-creation capability acts on file-like objects, and
Django’s <a class="reference internal" href="../ref/request-response.html#django.http.HttpResponse" title="django.http.HttpResponse"><tt class="xref py py-class docutils literal"><span class="pre">HttpResponse</span></tt></a> objects are file-like objects.</p>
<p>Here’s an example:</p>
<div class="highlight-python"><div class="highlight"><pre><span class="kn">import</span> <span class="nn">csv</span>
<span class="kn">from</span> <span class="nn">django.http</span> <span class="kn">import</span> <span class="n">HttpResponse</span>
<span class="k">def</span> <span class="nf">some_view</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">request</span><span class="p">):</span>
<span class="c"># Create the HttpResponse object with the appropriate CSV header.</span>
<span class="n">response</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="n">HttpResponse</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">mimetype</span><span class="o">=</span><span class="s">'text/csv'</span><span class="p">)</span>
<span class="n">response</span><span class="p">[</span><span class="s">'Content-Disposition'</span><span class="p">]</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="s">'attachment; filename=somefilename.csv'</span>
<span class="n">writer</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="n">csv</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">writer</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">response</span><span class="p">)</span>
<span class="n">writer</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">writerow</span><span class="p">([</span><span class="s">'First row'</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="s">'Foo'</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="s">'Bar'</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="s">'Baz'</span><span class="p">])</span>
<span class="n">writer</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">writerow</span><span class="p">([</span><span class="s">'Second row'</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="s">'A'</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="s">'B'</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="s">'C'</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="s">'"Testing"'</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="s">"Here's a quote"</span><span class="p">])</span>
<span class="k">return</span> <span class="n">response</span>
</pre></div>
</div>
<p>The code and comments should be self-explanatory, but a few things deserve a
mention:</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li>The response gets a special MIME type, <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">text/csv</span></tt>. This tells
browsers that the document is a CSV file, rather than an HTML file. If
you leave this off, browsers will probably interpret the output as HTML,
which will result in ugly, scary gobbledygook in the browser window.</li>
<li>The response gets an additional <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">Content-Disposition</span></tt> header, which
contains the name of the CSV file. This filename is arbitrary; call it
whatever you want. It'll be used by browsers in the "Save as..."
dialogue, etc.</li>
<li>Hooking into the CSV-generation API is easy: Just pass <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">response</span></tt> as the
first argument to <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">csv.writer</span></tt>. The <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">csv.writer</span></tt> function expects a
file-like object, and <a class="reference internal" href="../ref/request-response.html#django.http.HttpResponse" title="django.http.HttpResponse"><tt class="xref py py-class docutils literal"><span class="pre">HttpResponse</span></tt></a> objects fit the
bill.</li>
<li>For each row in your CSV file, call <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">writer.writerow</span></tt>, passing it an
iterable object such as a list or tuple.</li>
<li>The CSV module takes care of quoting for you, so you don't have to worry
about escaping strings with quotes or commas in them. Just pass
<tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">writerow()</span></tt> your raw strings, and it'll do the right thing.</li>
</ul>
<div class="section" id="s-handling-unicode">
<span id="handling-unicode"></span><h3>Handling Unicode<a class="headerlink" href="#handling-unicode" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h3>
<p>Python's <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">csv</span></tt> module does not support Unicode input. Since Django uses
Unicode internally this means strings read from sources such as
<a class="reference internal" href="../ref/request-response.html#django.http.HttpRequest" title="django.http.HttpRequest"><tt class="xref py py-class docutils literal"><span class="pre">HttpRequest</span></tt></a> are potentially problematic. There are a few
options for handling this:</p>
<ul class="simple">
<li>Manually encode all Unicode objects to a compatible encoding.</li>
<li>Use the <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">UnicodeWriter</span></tt> class provided in the <a class="reference external" href="http://docs.python.org/library/csv.html#examples">csv module's examples
section</a>.</li>
<li>Use the <a class="reference external" href="https://github.com/jdunck/python-unicodecsv">python-unicodecsv module</a>, which aims to be a drop-in
replacement for <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">csv</span></tt> that gracefully handles Unicode.</li>
</ul>
<p>For more information, see the Python <a class="reference external" href="http://docs.python.org/library/csv.html">CSV File Reading and Writing</a>
documentation.</p>
</div>
</div>
<div class="section" id="s-using-the-template-system">
<span id="using-the-template-system"></span><h2>Using the template system<a class="headerlink" href="#using-the-template-system" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>Alternatively, you can use the <a class="reference internal" href="../topics/templates.html"><em>Django template system</em></a>
to generate CSV. This is lower-level than using the convenient Python <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">csv</span></tt>
module, but the solution is presented here for completeness.</p>
<p>The idea here is to pass a list of items to your template, and have the
template output the commas in a <a class="reference internal" href="../ref/templates/builtins.html#std:templatetag-for"><tt class="xref std std-ttag docutils literal"><span class="pre">for</span></tt></a> loop.</p>
<p>Here's an example, which generates the same CSV file as above:</p>
<div class="highlight-python"><div class="highlight"><pre><span class="kn">from</span> <span class="nn">django.http</span> <span class="kn">import</span> <span class="n">HttpResponse</span>
<span class="kn">from</span> <span class="nn">django.template</span> <span class="kn">import</span> <span class="n">loader</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="n">Context</span>
<span class="k">def</span> <span class="nf">some_view</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">request</span><span class="p">):</span>
<span class="c"># Create the HttpResponse object with the appropriate CSV header.</span>
<span class="n">response</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="n">HttpResponse</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">mimetype</span><span class="o">=</span><span class="s">'text/csv'</span><span class="p">)</span>
<span class="n">response</span><span class="p">[</span><span class="s">'Content-Disposition'</span><span class="p">]</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="s">'attachment; filename=somefilename.csv'</span>
<span class="c"># The data is hard-coded here, but you could load it from a database or</span>
<span class="c"># some other source.</span>
<span class="n">csv_data</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="p">(</span>
<span class="p">(</span><span class="s">'First row'</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="s">'Foo'</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="s">'Bar'</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="s">'Baz'</span><span class="p">),</span>
<span class="p">(</span><span class="s">'Second row'</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="s">'A'</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="s">'B'</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="s">'C'</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="s">'"Testing"'</span><span class="p">,</span> <span class="s">"Here's a quote"</span><span class="p">),</span>
<span class="p">)</span>
<span class="n">t</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="n">loader</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">get_template</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="s">'my_template_name.txt'</span><span class="p">)</span>
<span class="n">c</span> <span class="o">=</span> <span class="n">Context</span><span class="p">({</span>
<span class="s">'data'</span><span class="p">:</span> <span class="n">csv_data</span><span class="p">,</span>
<span class="p">})</span>
<span class="n">response</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">write</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">t</span><span class="o">.</span><span class="n">render</span><span class="p">(</span><span class="n">c</span><span class="p">))</span>
<span class="k">return</span> <span class="n">response</span>
</pre></div>
</div>
<p>The only difference between this example and the previous example is that this
one uses template loading instead of the CSV module. The rest of the code --
such as the <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">mimetype='text/csv'</span></tt> -- is the same.</p>
<p>Then, create the template <tt class="docutils literal"><span class="pre">my_template_name.txt</span></tt>, with this template code:</p>
<div class="highlight-html+django"><div class="highlight"><pre><span class="cp">{%</span> <span class="k">for</span> <span class="nv">row</span> <span class="k">in</span> <span class="nv">data</span> <span class="cp">%}</span>"<span class="cp">{{</span> <span class="nv">row.0</span><span class="o">|</span><span class="nf">addslashes</span> <span class="cp">}}</span>", "<span class="cp">{{</span> <span class="nv">row.1</span><span class="o">|</span><span class="nf">addslashes</span> <span class="cp">}}</span>", "<span class="cp">{{</span> <span class="nv">row.2</span><span class="o">|</span><span class="nf">addslashes</span> <span class="cp">}}</span>", "<span class="cp">{{</span> <span class="nv">row.3</span><span class="o">|</span><span class="nf">addslashes</span> <span class="cp">}}</span>", "<span class="cp">{{</span> <span class="nv">row.4</span><span class="o">|</span><span class="nf">addslashes</span> <span class="cp">}}</span>"
<span class="cp">{%</span> <span class="k">endfor</span> <span class="cp">%}</span>
</pre></div>
</div>
<p>This template is quite basic. It just iterates over the given data and displays
a line of CSV for each row. It uses the <a class="reference internal" href="../ref/templates/builtins.html#std:templatefilter-addslashes"><tt class="xref std std-tfilter docutils literal"><span class="pre">addslashes</span></tt></a> template filter to
ensure there aren't any problems with quotes.</p>
</div>
<div class="section" id="s-other-text-based-formats">
<span id="other-text-based-formats"></span><h2>Other text-based formats<a class="headerlink" href="#other-text-based-formats" title="Permalink to this headline">¶</a></h2>
<p>Notice that there isn't very much specific to CSV here -- just the specific
output format. You can use either of these techniques to output any text-based
format you can dream of. You can also use a similar technique to generate
arbitrary binary data; see <a class="reference internal" href="outputting-pdf.html"><em>Outputting PDFs with Django</em></a> for an example.</p>
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<h3><a href="../contents.html">Table Of Contents</a></h3>
<ul>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#">Outputting CSV with Django</a><ul>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#using-the-python-csv-library">Using the Python CSV library</a><ul>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#handling-unicode">Handling Unicode</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#using-the-template-system">Using the template system</a></li>
<li><a class="reference internal" href="#other-text-based-formats">Other text-based formats</a></li>
</ul>
</li>
</ul>
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