Skip the header of a file with Python's CSV reader

SOURCE: http://evanhahn.com/python-skip-header-csv-reader/

I was choosing a new credit card and was between two options. One of them offered cash back on all purchases. The other offered less cash back on all purchases but much more cash back on certain purchases. I wanted to know: which credit card was better based on my purchase history? Like any normal person, I exported my transactions as CSV and began to dig around with Python.

My CSV file had a header on the first line, which was different from the rest. The file looked something like this (not my actual transactions):

Date,Description,Amount
2015-01-03,Cakes,22.55
2014-12-28,Rent,1000
2014-12-27,Candy Shop,12
...

I wanted to use Python's built-in CSV reader class and skip any parsing of the header line. So I did this:

with open('mycsv.csv', 'r') as csvfile:

    csvreader = csv.reader(csvfile)

    # This skips the first row of the CSV file.
    # csvreader.next() also works in Python 2.
    next(csvreader)

    for row in csvreader:
        # do stuff with rows...

The call to next reads the first row and discards it. From there, we're ready to iterate through the actual data! One small caveat: I had issues in Python 3 when opening the file in binary mode (rb instead of r).

This trick helped me choose my credit card and may help you do the same with CSVs in Python!