.. blogpost:: :title: What to do when read_csv fails? :keywords: pandas, read_csv, text file :date: 2015-11-08 :categories: pandas I recently faced some issues with method `read_csv `_ which could not read my text file. There was an issue with a null character. So I revisited some old code I wrote long time ago about guessing the schema of a text file: :func:`TextFileColumns `:: f = TextFileColumns(filename) f.open() for row in f: print(row) f.close() Each row is given as a dictionary:: {'Adj_Close': 5.95, 'High': 6.04, 'Open': 5.99, 'Low': 5.92, 'Volume': 5426200, 'Close': 5.95, 'Date': '2012-12-14'} The function guess the column types based on the first rows. It also guesses the column separator.