export data from csv file containing unicode characters

use this unicode-csv library instead

https://github.com/jdunck/python-unicodecsv

import unicodecsv as csv

with open('input.csv') as ifile:
  rows = [row for row in csv.reader(ifile, encoding='utf-8')]

print rows

You can wrap the csv.reader in a class to handle it for you. The following is taken from the csv documentation examples and works for me:

#! /usr/bin/env python
import csv, codecs

class UTF8Recoder:
    """
    Iterator that reads an encoded stream and reencodes the input to UTF-8
    """
    def __init__(self, f, encoding):
        self.reader = codecs.getreader(encoding)(f)

    def __iter__(self):
        return self

    def next(self):
        return self.reader.next().encode("utf-8")

class UnicodeReader:
    """
    A CSV reader which will iterate over lines in the CSV file "f",
    which is encoded in the given encoding.
    """

    def __init__(self, f, dialect=csv.excel, encoding="utf-8", **kwds):
        f = UTF8Recoder(f, encoding)
        self.reader = csv.reader(f, dialect=dialect, **kwds)

    def next(self):
        row = self.reader.next()
        return [unicode(s, "utf-8") for s in row]

    def __iter__(self):
        return self




csv.register_dialect('custom', delimiter=',',
                     doublequote=True,
                     escapechar=None,
                     quotechar='"',
                     quoting=csv.QUOTE_MINIMAL, skipinitialspace=False)

with open('input.csv') as ifile:
 data = UnicodeReader(ifile, dialect='custom')
 for record in data:
  for i, field in enumerate(record):
   print (" <field%s>" % i + field + "</field%s>" % i)

There is also a UnicodeWriter class there if you need that functionality.

It seems you are using Python 3. Follow the very first code example in the docs:

#!/usr/bin/env python3
import csv

with open('input.csv', newline='', encoding=encoding) as csvfile:
    reader = csv.reader(csvfile, dialect="custom")
    for row in reader:
        print(", ".join(row))

where "custom" dialect is defined in the code in your question and encoding is the character encoding of your file such as "utf-16". If you omit encoding argument; the encoding returned by locale.getpreferredencoding(False) is used.