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How to create CSV output | Django documentation

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:

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 hardcoded 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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