“Line contains NULL byte” in CSV reader (Python)

January 6, 2023 by Tarik

I’m guessing you have a NUL byte in input.csv. You can test that with

if '\0' in open('input.csv').read():
    print "you have null bytes in your input file"
else:
    print "you don't"

if you do,

reader = csv.reader(x.replace('\0', '') for x in mycsv)

may get you around that. Or it may indicate you have utf16 or something ‘interesting’ in the .csv file.