Thanks for the solution above, The raw data looked like User-ID,COUNTS 576460840144207854,6 576460821700280307,2 576460783848259584,1 576460809027715074,3 576460825909089607,1 576460817407934470,1
and i used CSV_INPUT1 = "C:/Example work/Attr_model/Activity_test.csv" fin1 = open(CSV_INPUT1, "rb") reader1 = csv.DictReader((fin1), [], delimiter=",") for row in reader1: print row with the following outcome. {None: ['User-ID', 'COUNTS']} {None: ['576460840144207854', '6']} {None: ['576460821700280307', '2']} {None: ['576460783848259584', '1']} {None: ['576460809027715074', '3']} {None: ['576460825909089607', '1']} So i can see csv.reader is what i should have been using Thanks for the help -- http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list