The API of the csv module in Python 2 is drastically different from the csv module in Python 3. This is due, for the most part, to the difference between str in Python 2 and Python 3.

The semantics of Python 3's version are more useful because they support unicode natively, while Python 2's csv does not.

pip install backports.csv

First make sure you're starting your file off right:

from backports import csv

Then be careful with your files to handle the encoding. If you're working with a binary file-like object, io.TextIOWrapper can be very helpful. If you're dealing with a file, you can just use io.open instead of Python 2's open builtin, and it works just like Python 3's builtin open.

from backports import csv
import io

def read_csv(filename):
    with io.open(filename, newline='', encoding='utf-8') as f:
        for row in csv.reader(f):
            yield row

def write_csv(filename, rows):
    with io.open(filename, 'w', newline='', encoding='utf-8') as f:
        writer = csv.writer(f)
        for row in rows:
            writer.writerow(row)

Note: It is safe to specify newline='', since the csv module does its own (universal) newline handling.