How to create CSV output

This document explains how to output CSV (Comma Separated Values) dynamically using Django views. To do this, you can either use the Python CSV library or the Django template system.

Using the Python CSV library

Python comes with a CSV library, csv. The key to using it with Django is that the csv module’s CSV-creation capability acts on file-like objects, and Django’s HttpResponse objects are file-like objects.

Here’s an example:

import csv
from django.http import HttpResponse

def some_view(request):
    # Create the HttpResponse object with the appropriate CSV header.
    response = HttpResponse(
        content_type='text/csv',
        headers={'Content-Disposition': 'attachment; filename="somefilename.csv"'},
    )

    writer = csv.writer(response)
    writer.writerow(['First row', 'Foo', 'Bar', 'Baz'])
    writer.writerow(['Second row', 'A', 'B', 'C', '"Testing"', "Here's a quote"])

    return response

The code and comments should be self-explanatory, but a few things deserve a mention:

  • The response gets a special MIME type, text/csv. 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.
  • The response gets an additional Content-Disposition 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…” dialog, etc.
  • You can hook into the CSV-generation API by passing response as the first argument to csv.writer. The csv.writer function expects a file-like object, and HttpResponse objects fit the bill.
  • For each row in your CSV file, call writer.writerow, passing it an iterable.
  • 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. Pass writerow() your raw strings, and it’ll do the right thing.

Streaming large CSV files

When dealing with views that generate very large responses, you might want to consider using Django’s StreamingHttpResponse instead. For example, by streaming a file that takes a long time to generate you can avoid a load balancer dropping a connection that might have otherwise timed out while the server was generating the response.

In this example, we make full use of Python generators to efficiently handle the assembly and transmission of a large CSV file:

import csv

from django.http import StreamingHttpResponse

class Echo:
    """An object that implements just the write method of the file-like
    interface.
    """
    def write(self, value):
        """Write the value by returning it, instead of storing in a buffer."""
        return value

def some_streaming_csv_view(request):
    """A view that streams a large CSV file."""
    # Generate a sequence of rows. The range is based on the maximum number of
    # rows that can be handled by a single sheet in most spreadsheet
    # applications.
    rows = (["Row {}".format(idx), str(idx)] for idx in range(65536))
    pseudo_buffer = Echo()
    writer = csv.writer(pseudo_buffer)
    return StreamingHttpResponse(
        (writer.writerow(row) for row in rows),
        content_type="text/csv",
        headers={'Content-Disposition': 'attachment; filename="somefilename.csv"'},
    )

Using the template system

Alternatively, you can use the Django template system to generate CSV. This is lower-level than using the convenient Python csv module, but the solution is presented here for completeness.

The idea here is to pass a list of items to your template, and have the template output the commas in a for loop.

Here’s an example, which generates the same CSV file as above:

from django.http import HttpResponse
from django.template import loader

def some_view(request):
    # Create the HttpResponse object with the appropriate CSV header.
    response = HttpResponse(
        content_type='text/csv'
        headers={'Content-Disposition': 'attachment; filename="somefilename.csv"'},
    )

    # The data is hard-coded here, but you could load it from a database or
    # some other source.
    csv_data = (
        ('First row', 'Foo', 'Bar', 'Baz'),
        ('Second row', 'A', 'B', 'C', '"Testing"', "Here's a quote"),
    )

    t = loader.get_template('my_template_name.txt')
    c = {'data': csv_data}
    response.write(t.render(c))
    return response

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 content_type='text/csv' – is the same.

Then, create the template my_template_name.txt, with this template code:

{% for row in data %}"{{ row.0|addslashes }}", "{{ row.1|addslashes }}", "{{ row.2|addslashes }}", "{{ row.3|addslashes }}", "{{ row.4|addslashes }}"
{% endfor %}

This short template iterates over the given data and displays a line of CSV for each row. It uses the addslashes template filter to ensure there aren’t any problems with quotes.

Other text-based formats

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 How to create PDF files for an example.

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