How to read and render a.txt file in the Django template?

Question

How do I render the data of a arquivo.txt in a Django template?

contents of the archive:

1;'one';'foo'

2;'two';'bar'

I return in the template

1 - one - foo

2 - two - bar

Any hint where I start?

Following the website http://www.coderholic.com/parsing-csv-data-in-python/

I tried the following:

def display_text_file():
    with open('output.csv', 'rt') as f:
        r = csv.reader(f, delimiter=';')
        fields = r.next()
        for row in r:
            items = zip(fields, row)
            item = {}
            for (name, value) in items:
                item[name] = value.strip()

Now how do I return this in the view context to iterate for the values in the template?

I tried to

{% for line in lines %}
    <p>{{ line.id  }}</p>
{% endfor %}

Answer 1

I’ll assume the apostrophes ' do not exist, so your file . txt should be something like:

1;one;foo
2;two;bar
3;foo;bar

Each line would be equivalent to a database line, this format is very similar to CSV, so I believe you can use https://docs.python.org/2/library/csv.html

It must be something like:

import csv

with open('arquivo.txt', 'rb') as csvfile:
     spamreader = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=';', quotechar='|')
     for row in spamreader:
        print 'ID: %s Nome: %s Extra: ' %(row[0], row[1], row[2])

From the layout, it seems that the array is of type index (0...99 for example) and not "associative":

{% for line in lines %}
    <p>{{ line.id  }}</p>
{% endfor %}

I believe the data would have to be passed this way:

import csv

item = []

with open('arquivo.txt', 'rb') as csvfile:
     spamreader = csv.reader(csvfile, delimiter=';', quotechar='|')
     for row in spamreader:
        tmp = {}
        tmp['id']    = row[0]
        tmp['name']  = row[1]
        tmp['extra'] = row[2]
        item.append(tmp)

I haven’t worked with python for some time, but I believe this is it. Let me know if there are any Exception.

Answer 2

It’s not complicated, considering the file’s called file.txt, is at the root of the project and has this content:

1;one;foo
2;two;bar

Your app with a structure similar to this:

├── admin.py
├── __init__.py
├── migrations
│   └── __init__.py
├── models.py
├── templates
│   └── csv
│       └── csv.html
├── tests.py
└── views.py

And your template with content similar to this:

{% for line in lines%}
    <p>{{ line.id }} - {{ line.nro }} - {{ line.word }}</p>
{% endfor %}

Basically the view needs to have something like this:

import csv
from django.shortcuts import render_to_response


def render_csv(request):
    lines = []
    with open('file.txt', 'r') as f:
        reader = csv.reader(f, delimiter=';')
        for line in reader:
            lines.append(
                {'id': line[0], 'nro': line[1], 'word': line[2]}
            )

    return render_to_response(
        'csv/csv.html',
        {'lines': lines}
    )

Explaining what’s being done.

1. First we’re reading the file txt (which is actually a file csv) through the package csv (built-in python)
2. We will continue in this file to assemble the list of items that will later be used in context of Sponse.
3. Finally we use the shortcut render_to_response from Django that takes the template path and context as parameter.

The html answer looks something like:

<p>1 - one - foo</p>
<p>2 - two - bar</p>

I hope it helped.