Processing CSV files with csv.DictReader is great - but I have CSV files with comment lines (indicated by a hash at the start of a line), for example: # step size=1.61853 val0,val1,val2,hybridisation,temp,smattr 0.206895,0.797923,0.202077,0.631199,0.368801,0.311052,0.688948,0.597237,0.402763 -169.32,1,1.61853,2.04069e-92,1,0.000906546,0.999093,0.241356,0.758644,0.202382 # adaptation finished The csv module doesn't include any way to skip such lines. I could easily do something hacky, but I imagine there's a nice way to wrap a csv.DictReader around some other iterator object, which preprocesses to discard the lines. Continue reading...