I have a large CSV file with one column and line breaks in some of its rows. I want to read the content of each cell and write it to a text file but the CSV reader is splitting the cells with line breaks into multiple ones (multiple rows) and writing each one to a separate text file.

Using Python 3.6.2 on a MAC Sierra

Here is an example:

"content of row 1"
"content of row 2 continues here"
"content of row 3"

And here is how I am reading it:

with open(csvFileName, 'r') as csvfile:lines= csv.reader(csvfile)i=0for row in lines:i+=1content= rowoutFile= open("output"+str(i)+".txt", 'w')outFile.write(content)outFile.close()

This is creating 4 files instead of 3 for each row. Any suggestions on how to ignore the line break in the second row?

You could define a regular expression pattern to help you iterate over the rows.

Read the entire file contents - if possible.

s = '''"content of row 1"
"content of row 2 continues here"
"content of row 3"'''

Pattern - double-quote, followed by anything that isn't a double-quote, followed by a double-quote.:

row_pattern = '''"[^"]*"'''
row = re.compile(row_pattern, flags = re.DOTALL | re.MULTILINE)

Iterate the rows:

for r in row.finditer(s):print r.group()print '******'>>> 
"content of row 1"
******
"content of row 2 continues here"
******
"content of row 3"
******
>>>