Way to convert dbf to csv in python?

Question

I have a folder with a bunch of dbf files I would like to convert to csv. I have tried using a code to just change the extension from .dbf to .csv, and these files open fine when I use Excel, but when I open them in pandas they look like this:

                                                s\t�
0                                                NaN
1            1       176 1.58400000000e+005-3.385...

This is not what I want, and those characters don't appear in the real file.
How should I read in the dbf file correctly?

Answer 1

Using my dbf library you could do something like:

import sys
import dbf
for arg in sys.argv[1:]:
    dbf.export(arg)

which will create a .csv file of the same name as each dbf file. If you put that code into a script named dbf2csv.py you could then call it as

python dbf2csv.py dbfname dbf2name dbf3name ...