A Python command-line tool to automatically clean CSV files by removing empty rows, duplicate rows, and handling missing values.

• Remove Empty Rows: Automatically detects and removes completely empty rows from CSV files
• Remove Duplicates: Identifies and eliminates duplicate rows while preserving unique data
• Handle Missing Values: Offers multiple strategies for dealing with missing or empty cells:
  • remove: Remove rows containing any missing values (default)
  • fill: Fill missing values with 'N/A'
  • keep: Keep rows as-is without modification

• Python 3.6 or higher
• No external dependencies (uses only Python standard library)

No installation required! Just download the auto_csv_cleaner.py file and run it.

Clean a CSV file with default settings (removes empty rows, duplicates, and rows with missing values):

python auto_csv_cleaner.py input.csv

This will create a cleaned file named input_cleaned.csv in the same directory.

python auto_csv_cleaner.py input.csv output.csv

Remove rows with missing values (default):

python auto_csv_cleaner.py input.csv --strategy remove

Fill missing values with 'N/A':

python auto_csv_cleaner.py input.csv --strategy fill

Keep rows with missing values:

python auto_csv_cleaner.py input.csv --strategy keep

Input CSV (messy.csv):

Name,Age,City
John,25,NYC
Jane,30,LA
,,
John,25,NYC
Bob,,Chicago

Command:

python auto_csv_cleaner.py messy.csv --strategy fill

Output CSV (messy_cleaned.csv):

Name,Age,City
John,25,NYC
Jane,30,LA
Bob,N/A,Chicago

The tool provides helpful statistics during cleaning:

• Original number of rows
• Rows after removing empty entries
• Rows after removing duplicates
• Rows after handling missing values

This tool was created for issue #1006 of the 100LinesOfPythonCode repository.

Free to use and modify!

Contributed to 100LinesOfPythonCode - Hacktoberfest 2025