Introducing a basic data wrangling work flow
This chapter is about understanding the components of a program that processes data. As mentioned in the introduction, the approach taken here will be to process data on a basic level. A particular emphasis is placed on opening, reading and writing data in this chapter. Later chapters will focus more on exploration and modification of data.
The following is a basic work flow for data wrangling that applies to processing data files. Data wrangling is not necessarily a linear process, but these steps will help to give a frame of reference for the range of tools and approaches that will be demonstrated in this chapter and throughout the rest of the book.
- Open the file containing the input data from within the program:
- In order for a program to gain access to the data in a particular file, the program first needs to interact with the computer's file system to open the file. This is referred to as file I/O and Python has built-in support to make this...
