I'm relatively new to the world of TensorFlow, and pretty perplexed by how you'd ***actually*** read CSV data into a usable example/label tensors in TensorFlow. The example from the [TensorFlow tutorial on reading CSV data](https://www.tensorflow.org/versions/r0.7/how_tos/reading_data/index.html#reading-from-files) is pretty fragmented and only gets you part of the way to being able to train on CSV data.

Here's my code that I've pieced together, based off that CSV tutorial:

```
from __future__ import print_function
import tensorflow as tf

def file_len(fname):
    with open(fname) as f:
        for i, l in enumerate(f):
            pass
    return i + 1

filename = "csv_test_data.csv"

# setup text reader
file_length = file_len(filename)
filename_queue = tf.train.string_input_producer([filename])
reader = tf.TextLineReader(skip_header_lines=1)
_, csv_row = reader.read(filename_queue)

# setup CSV decoding
record_defaults = [[0],[0],[0],[0],[0]]
col1,col2,col3,col4,col5 = tf.decode_csv(csv_row, record_defaults=record_defaults)

# turn features back into a tensor
features = tf.stack([col1,col2,col3,col4])

print("loading, " + str(file_length) + " line(s)\n")
with tf.Session() as sess:
  tf.initialize_all_variables().run()

  # start populating filename queue
  coord = tf.train.Coordinator()
  threads = tf.train.start_queue_runners(coord=coord)

  for i in range(file_length):
    # retrieve a single instance
    example, label = sess.run([features, col5])
    print(example, label)

  coord.request_stop()
  coord.join(threads)
  print("\ndone loading")

```

And here is an brief example from the CSV file I'm loading - pretty basic data - 4 feature columns, and 1 label column:

```
0,0,0,0,0
0,15,0,0,0
0,30,0,0,0
0,45,0,0,0

```

All the code above does is **print each example from the CSV file, one by one**, which, while nice, is pretty darn useless for training.

What I'm struggling with here is how you'd actually turn those individual examples, loaded one-by-one, into a training dataset. For example, [here's a notebook](https://github.com/rringham/deep-learning-notebooks/blob/master/notMNIST_four_hidden_layers.ipynb) I was working on in the Udacity Deep Learning course. I basically want to take the CSV data I'm loading, and plop it into something like **train\_dataset** and **train\_labels**:

```
def reformat(dataset, labels):
  dataset = dataset.reshape((-1, image_size * image_size)).astype(np.float32)
  # Map 2 to [0.0, 1.0, 0.0 ...], 3 to [0.0, 0.0, 1.0 ...]
  labels = (np.arange(num_labels) == labels[:,None]).astype(np.float32)
  return dataset, labels
train_dataset, train_labels = reformat(train_dataset, train_labels)
valid_dataset, valid_labels = reformat(valid_dataset, valid_labels)
test_dataset, test_labels = reformat(test_dataset, test_labels)
print('Training set', train_dataset.shape, train_labels.shape)
print('Validation set', valid_dataset.shape, valid_labels.shape)
print('Test set', test_dataset.shape, test_labels.shape)

```

I've tried using `tf.train.shuffle_batch`, like this, but it just inexplicably hangs:

```
  for i in range(file_length):
    # retrieve a single instance
    example, label = sess.run([features, colRelevant])
    example_batch, label_batch = tf.train.shuffle_batch([example, label], batch_size=file_length, capacity=file_length, min_after_dequeue=10000)
    print(example, label)

```

So to sum up, here are my questions:

* **What am I missing about this process?**
	+ It feels like there is some key intuition that I'm missing about how to properly build an input pipeline.
* **Is there a way to avoid having to know the length of the CSV file?**
	+ It feels pretty inelegant to have to know the number of lines you want to process (the `for i in range(file_length)` line of code above)

---

**Edit:**
As soon as Yaroslav pointed out that I was likely mixing up imperative and graph-construction parts here, it started to become clearer. I was able to pull together the following code, which I think is closer to what would typically done when training a model from CSV (excluding any model training code):

```
from __future__ import print_function
import numpy as np
import tensorflow as tf
import math as math
import argparse

parser = argparse.ArgumentParser()
parser.add_argument('dataset')
args = parser.parse_args()

def file_len(fname):
    with open(fname) as f:
        for i, l in enumerate(f):
            pass
    return i + 1

def read_from_csv(filename_queue):
  reader = tf.TextLineReader(skip_header_lines=1)
  _, csv_row = reader.read(filename_queue)
  record_defaults = [[0],[0],[0],[0],[0]]
  colHour,colQuarter,colAction,colUser,colLabel = tf.decode_csv(csv_row, record_defaults=record_defaults)
  features = tf.stack([colHour,colQuarter,colAction,colUser])  
  label = tf.stack([colLabel])  
  return features, label

def input_pipeline(batch_size, num_epochs=None):
  filename_queue = tf.train.string_input_producer([args.dataset], num_epochs=num_epochs, shuffle=True)  
  example, label = read_from_csv(filename_queue)
  min_after_dequeue = 10000
  capacity = min_after_dequeue + 3 * batch_size
  example_batch, label_batch = tf.train.shuffle_batch(
      [example, label], batch_size=batch_size, capacity=capacity,
      min_after_dequeue=min_after_dequeue)
  return example_batch, label_batch

file_length = file_len(args.dataset) - 1
examples, labels = input_pipeline(file_length, 1)

with tf.Session() as sess:
  tf.initialize_all_variables().run()

  # start populating filename queue
  coord = tf.train.Coordinator()
  threads = tf.train.start_queue_runners(coord=coord)

  try:
    while not coord.should_stop():
      example_batch, label_batch = sess.run([examples, labels])
      print(example_batch)
  except tf.errors.OutOfRangeError:
    print('Done training, epoch reached')
  finally:
    coord.request_stop()

  coord.join(threads) 

```