The API of the csv module in Python 2 is drastically different from the csv module in Python 3. This is due, for the most part, to the difference between str in Python 2 and Python 3. The semantics of Python 3's version are more useful because they support unicode natively, while Python 2's csv does not. WWW: https://pypi.org/project/backports.csv/ WWW: https://github.com/ryanhiebert/backports.csv