Looked in the DAL section of the manual, looks like you need to open the file and supply the File object as the parameter to db.table.import_from_csv(...)
You can serialize a single table in CSV and store it in a file "test.csv": 1. >>> open('test.csv', 'w').write(str(db(db.person.id).select())) and you can easily read it back with: 1. >>> db.person.import_from_csv_file(open('test.csv', 'r')) Sorry I missed that first time. Ron