Writing CSV

For better or worse, there are a lot of CSV files in the world. Like most technologies, there are good and bad parts to CSV files. On the plus side, they are human-readable, can be opened in any text editor, and most spreadsheet software can load them. On the downside, there is no standard for CSV files, so encoding may be weird, there is no way to enforce types, and they can be large because they are text-based (though they can be compressed).

In this recipe, we will show how to create a CSV file from a pandas DataFrame.

There are a few methods on the DataFrame that start with to_. These are methods that export DataFrames. We are going to use the .to_csv method. We will write out to a string buffer in the examples, but you will usually use a filename instead.

How to do it...

1. Write the DataFrame to a CSV file:

   >>> beatles
        first       last  birth
   0     Paul  McCartney   1942
   1     John     Lennon   1940
   2  Richard    Starkey...