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I'm trying to read in a CSV file into a pandas dataframe and select a column, but keep getting a key error.

The file reads in successfully and I can view the dataframe in an iPython notebook, but when I want to select a column any other than the first one, it throws a key error.

I am using this code:

import pandas as pd

transactions = pd.read_csv('transactions.csv',low_memory=False, delimiter=',', header=0, encoding='ascii')
transactions['quarter']

This is the file I'm working on:
https://www.dropbox.com/s/imd7hq2iq23hf8o/transactions.csv?dl=0

Thank you!

use sep='s*,s*' so that you will take care of spaces in column-names:

transactions = pd.read_csv('transactions.csv', sep='s*,s*',
 header=0, encoding='ascii', engine='python')

alternatively you can make sure that you don't have unquoted spaces in your CSV file and use your command (unchanged)

prove:

print(transactions.columns.tolist())

Output:

['product_id', 'customer_id', 'store_id', 'promotion_id', 'month_of_year', 'quarter', 'the_year', 'store_sales', 'store_cost', 'unit_sales', 'fact_count']

I finally got the answer how to read a specific column:

import pandas as pd 

df=pd.read_csv('titanic.csv',sep='t')

df['Sex'] 

Because pandas separator uses t. I hope that works for you.

The key error generally comes if the key doesn't match any of the dataframe column name 'exactly':

You could also try:

import csv
import pandas as pd
import re
 with open (filename, "r") as file:
 df = pd.read_csv(file, delimiter = ",")
 df.columns = ((df.columns.str).replace("^ ","")).str.replace(" $","")
 print(df.columns)