Pandas read_csv from url

UPDATE: From pandas 0.19.2 you can now just pass read_csv() the url directly, although that will fail if it requires authentication.

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For older pandas versions, or if you need authentication, or for any other HTTP-fault-tolerant reason:

Use pandas.read_csv with a file-like object as the first argument.

• If you want to read the csv from a string, you can use io.StringIO.

• For the URL https://github.com/cs109/2014_data/blob/master/countries.csv, you get html response, not raw csv; you should use the url given by the Raw link in the github page for getting raw csv response , which is https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cs109/2014_data/master/countries.csv

Example:

import pandas as pd
import io
import requests
url="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cs109/2014_data/master/countries.csv"
s=requests.get(url).content
c=pd.read_csv(io.StringIO(s.decode('utf-8')))

Notes:

in Python 2.x, the string-buffer object was StringIO.StringIO

In the latest version of pandas (0.19.2) you can directly pass the url

import pandas as pd

url="https://raw.githubusercontent.com/cs109/2014_data/master/countries.csv"
c=pd.read_csv(url)