How to combine multiple CSV files with 8 lines of code
Why do you need this?
Manually copy-pasting is fine if you don’t have too many files to work with.
But imagine if you have 100+ files to concatenate — are you willing to do it manually? Doing this repetitively is tedious and error-prone.
If all the files have the same table structure (same headers & number of columns), let this tiny Python script do the work.
Step 1: Import packages and set the working directory
Change “/mydir” to your desired working directory.
Step 2: Use glob to match the pattern ‘csv’
Match the pattern (‘csv’) and save the list of file names in the ‘all_filenames’ variable. You can check out this link to learn more about regular expression matching.
Step 3: Combine all files in the list and export as CSV
Use pandas to concatenate all files in the list and export as CSV. The output file is named “combined_csv.csv” located in your working directory.
encoding = ‘utf-8-sig’ is added to overcome the issue when exporting ‘Non-English’ languages.
And…it’s done!
This article was inspired by my actual everyday problem, and the coding structure is from a discussion on stackoverflow. The completed script for this how-to is documented on GitHub.
