"Line contains NULL byte" in CSV reader (Python)

Question

I'm trying to write a program that looks at a .CSV file (input.csv) and rewrites only the rows that begin with a certain element (corrected.csv), as listed in a text file (output.txt).

This is what my program looks like right now:

import csv

lines = []
with open('output.txt','r') as f:
    for line in f.readlines():
        lines.append(line[:-1])

with open('corrected.csv','w') as correct:
    writer = csv.writer(correct, dialect = 'excel')
    with open('input.csv', 'r') as mycsv:
        reader = csv.reader(mycsv)
        for row in reader:
            if row[0] not in lines:
                writer.writerow(row)

Unfortunately, I keep getting this error, and I have no clue what it's about.

Traceback (most recent call last):
  File "C:Python32Sample ProgramcsvParser.py", line 12, in <module>
    for row in reader:
_csv.Error: line contains NULL byte

Credit to all the people here to even to get me to this point.

Answer 1

I've solved a similar problem with an easier solution:

import codecs
csvReader = csv.reader(codecs.open('file.csv', 'rU', 'utf-16'))

The key was using the codecs module to open the file with the UTF-16 encoding, there are a lot more of encodings, check the documentation.