Python: How To Create A Csv String (no File) From A List Of Dictionaries?

In Python I have a list of dictionaries like this:

[
    {
        "col2": "2",
        "id": "1",
        "col3": "3",
        "col1": "1"
    },
    {
        "col2": "4",
        "id": "2",
        "col3": "6",
        "col1": "2"
    },
    {
        "col1": "1",
        "col2": "4",
        "id": "3",
        "col3": "7"
    }
]

and I need to convert this to a string in csv format including a header row. (For starters let's not care about column and row delimiters...) So, ideally the result would be:

id,col1,col2,col3
1,1,2,3
2,2,4,6
3,1,4,7

("ideally" because the column order does not really matter; having the "id" column first would be nice though...)

I have searched SOF and there are a number of similar questions but the answers always involve creating a csv file using csv.DictWriter. I don't want to create a file, I just want that string!

Of course, I could loop over the list and inside this loop loop over the dictionary keys and in this way create the csv string using string operations. But surely there must be some more elegant and efficient way of doing this?

Also, I'm aware of the Pandas library but I am trying to do this in a very limited environment where I would prefer to use only built-in modules.

You can use io.StringIO to write to a 'string' instead of a file. Using the example of csv.DictWriter we get the following code:

import csv
import io

data = [...]  # your list of dicts

with io.StringIO() as csvfile:
    fieldnames = ['id', 'col1', 'col2', 'col3']
    writer = csv.DictWriter(csvfile, fieldnames=fieldnames)

    writer.writeheader()
    for row in data:
        writer.writerow(row)
    print(csvfile.getvalue())