Using python csv writer without quotations

Quoting behavior is controlled by the various quoting arguments provided to the writer (or set on the Dialect object if you prefer to do things that way). The default setting is QUOTE_MINIMAL, which will not produce the behavior you're describing unless a value contains your delimiter character, quote character, or line terminator character. Doublecheck your test data - [u'123', u'hello'] won't produce what you describe, but [u'123', u' hello'] would.

You can specify QUOTE_NONE if you're sure that's the behavior you want, in which case it'll either try to escape instances of your delimiter character if you set an escape character, or raise an exception if you don't.

Do you need the csv lib? Just join the strings...

>>> res = [u'123', u'hello'] 
>>> print res
[u'123', u'hello']
>>> print " ".join(res)
123 hello

You can set the csv.writer to quote nothing with quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONE for example:

import csv
with open('eggs.csv', 'wb') as csvfile:
    spamwriter = csv.writer(csvfile, delimiter=' ',
                            escapechar=' ', quoting=csv.QUOTE_NONE)
    spamwriter.writerow(['Spam'] * 5 + ['Baked Beans'])
    spamwriter.writerow(['Spam', 'Lovely Spam', 'Wonderful Spam'])

Produces:

Spam Spam Spam Spam Spam Baked  Beans
Spam Lovely  Spam Wonderful  Spam

If you do QUOTING_NONE you also need and escape character.