Handling data with TSV files

In this section, we will explain how to handle Tab Separated Values (TSV) files.

Getting ready

The DataFrames package is needed to deal with TSV files. So, as it is already installed as instructed in the previous section, we can move ahead and make sure that all the packages are up-to-date with the following command:

Pkg.update()

How to do it...

TSV files, as the name suggests, are files whose contents are separated by commas. TSV files can be accessed and read into the REPL process by the following method:

1. Assign a variable to the local source directory of the file:

   s = "/Users/username/dir/data.tsv"
   

2. The readtable() command is used to read the data from the source. The data is read in the form of a Julia DataFrame:

   data = readtable(s)
   

Data can be written to TSV files from a Julia DataFrame using the following steps:

1. Create a data structure with some data inside it. For example, let's create a two-dimensional dataframe like the one we created in the previous example:

   using DataFrames
   df = DataFrame(A = 1:10, B = 11:20)
   

2. Now, the dataframe, which we created in Step 1, can be exported to an external TSV file using the following command:

   writetable("data.csv",df)
   

The writetable() command is clever enough to make out the format of the file from the filename extension.