title: Read CSV and Separate by column
body: <p>Brand new to Python (and programming in general), if this is simple and/or answered somewhere I didn't find, feel free to harass me in typical forum fashion.</p>
  
  <p>I've got a bunch of CSVs, each containing 10 XY coordinates like this:</p>
  
  <pre><code>10,5
  2,4
  5,6 
  7,8
  9,12
  3,45
  2,4
  6,5
  0,3 
  5,6 
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'm looking to separate the X coordinates and Y coordinates into two seperate lists, so that I can subtract a value from each value in a given list. For example, subtracting 5 from every value in the X coordinate list and 3 from every value in the Y coordinate list. I'm then going to take the abs() of each value and find the minimum. Once those minimums are found, I want to add the lists together so that each value is added to it's counterpart</p>
  
  <p>IE) if the absolute values of X were something like</p>
  
  <pre><code>4
  5
  ....
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>and Y something like</p>
  
  <pre><code>6
  7
  ....
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>I'd want to add 4 and 6, then 5 and 7, etc. </p>
  
  <p>To separate them, I tried </p>
  
  <pre><code>import csv
  filein = open("/path/here")
  reader = csv.reader(filein, skipinitialspace = True)
  listofxys = []
  for row in reader:
      listofxys.append(row)
  
  Xs = listofxys.pop(0) # to pop all the X's
  
  Ys = listofxys.pop() # to pop all the Y's
  </code></pre>
  
  <p>But instead of all the leading values, it provides the first XY pair. What am I doing wrong here?</p>
  
  <p>The eventual goal is to find the closest point to an XY coordinate, so if this is a bad way to go about it, feel free to steer me in another direction. </p>
  
  <p>Thanks in advance!</p>