I have a CSV file that contains extra newlines in some fields, e.g.: A, B, C, D, E, F 123, 456, tree , very, bla, indigo I tried the following: import csv catalog = csv.reader(open('test.csv', 'rU'), delimiter=",", dialect=csv.excel_tab) for row in catalog: print "Length: ", len(row), row and the result I got was this: Length: 6 ['A', ' B', ' C', ' D', ' E', ' F'] Length: 3 ['123', ' 456', ' tree'] Length: 4 [' ', ' very', ' bla', ' indigo'] Does anyone have any idea how I can quickly remove extraneous newlines? Thanks!