Typical API data formats

Many websites distribute data via their API, which bridges applications via standardized architecture. While we are not going to cover the details of using APIs here, we will cover the most common API data exchange formats, namely CSV and JSON.

Note

Interested readers can visit site-specific documentations for the use of APIs.

We have briefly covered parsing of CSV files in Chapter 4, Advanced Matplotlib. To aid your understanding, we are going to represent the same data using both CSV and JSON.

CSV

Comma-separated values (CSV) is one of the oldest file formats, introduced long before the World Wide Web even existed. However, it is now becoming deprecated as other advanced formats such as JSON and XML are gaining popularity. As the name suggests, data values are separated by commas. The preinstalled csv package and the pandas package contain classes to read and write data in CSV format. The following CSV example defines a population table with two countries:

Country,Time...