BCP Reader

A reader for BCP-format data files. BCP files are similar to CSV files but contain a multi-character line and field delimiters. The default delimiters used are:

• field delimiter: @**@
• line delimiter: *@@*

Python's csv module can only deal with single character delimiters, so this module has a reader function and DictReader class which should be drop-in replacements for python's csv module equivalents.

Credits

The author of the main method is Gertjan van den Burg of the Alan Turing Institute. It was based on a method originally developed by David Kane at NCVO.

Installation

Install with pip install bcp-reader

Usage

The module can be used by importing from the bcp module in a python script:

import bcp

with open('path_to_bcp_file.bcp') as f:
    bcpreader = bcp.reader(f)
    for row in bcpreader:
        print(row)
        # ["Value 1", "Value 2"]

with open('path_to_bcp_file.bcp') as f:
    bcpreader = bcp.DictReader(f, fieldnames=["field 1", "field 2"])
    for row in bcpreader:
        print(row)
        # {"field 1": "Value 1", "field 2": "Value 2"}

You can also use it via the command line to convert a BCP file to CSV:

bcp path_to_bcp_file.bcp > csv_output.csv