Python script for decoding NCSBE voter data

streamncv.py

#!/usr/bin/env python3
"""
streamncv.py
============
Translates from latin-1 tab-separated-values to UTF-8 comma-separated values
on the fly, without trying to allocate the entire file.

It also prints progress updates.
"""
import csv
import io
import sys

latin1stdin = io.TextIOWrapper(sys.stdin.buffer, 'latin1')
reader = csv.reader(latin1stdin, dialect='excel-tab')
writer = csv.writer(sys.stdout, dialect='excel')

n = 0

for row in reader:
    writer.writerow([c.strip() for c in row])
    n += 1
    if n % 1000 == 0:
        sys.stderr.write("\r{}".format(n))
        sys.stderr.flush()