Reading and Writing CSV Files🔖

You need to store tasks between server restarts. A CSV file is the right tool for now: plain text, opens in a spreadsheet, no setup required.

Why not just write the file yourself?🔖

You could open a file and write comma-separated values manually. But what happens when a description contains a comma? Or a newline? Your homemade parser breaks. This problem is exactly solved by the standard library.

import csv

No pip install. It's built into Python.

Reading: csv.DictReader🔖

DictReader reads each row as a dictionary, using the first row of the file as the keys:

tasks = []
with open("tasks.csv", "r") as f:
    reader = csv.DictReader(f)
    for row in reader:
        tasks.append(row)

Each row is a dict: {"datetime": "2025-10-07", "project_title": "...", "title": "...", ...}. This is exactly what Jinja's {{ task.title }} expects.

Writing: csv.DictWriter🔖

DictWriter writes dictionaries as rows. You define the column order with fieldnames:

with open("tasks.csv", "a", newline="") as f:
    fieldnames = ["datetime", "project_title", "title", "description", "status", "next_steps"]
    writer = csv.DictWriter(f, fieldnames=fieldnames)
    writer.writerow({
        "datetime": datetime.now().strftime("%Y-%m-%d %H:%M:%S"),
        "project_title": project_title,
        "title": title,
        "description": description,
        "status": status,
        "next_steps": next_steps,
    })

The mode that destroys your data🔖

The newline="" argument🔖

with open("tasks.csv", "a", newline="") as f:

Without newline="", Python adds an extra blank line after every row on Windows (and sometimes Mac). Your CSV will have alternating data rows and empty rows, and DictReader will get confused. Always include it when writing CSV.

The tool acquisition pattern🔖

Walk through the reasoning:

1. You need to store structured data in a text file.
2. You could split each line by commas — but commas can appear inside fields.
3. Surely someone has solved this.
4. import csv — standard library, no install, handles quoting automatically.

This pattern — "I have a structured problem, let me find a library" — comes up constantly. The answer is almost always already in the standard library or a one-line pip install.