Even if you are new to programming, opening, modifying and saving files within programs should be a relatively familiar process. You have likely opened and edited a document with a word processor or entered data into an Excel spread sheet.
Like a computer program, a dataset can be represented using a text file with a specific syntactical structure. The text in a data file specifies both the information contained in the data and the structure in which that information is placed. In a sense, writing a program to process data files is a similar to the process of editing a document or a spreadsheet. First, the content of a file is opened, observed, and modified, and then the result is saved.
Another general strategy to store and retrieve digital data is to use a database. Databases are organized collections of data that allow for efficient...
