Data formats

When we are working with data for human consumption the easiest way to store it is through text files. In this section, we will present parsing examples of the most common formats such as CSV, JSON, and XML. These examples will be very helpful in the next chapters.

Tip

The dataset used for these examples is a list of Pokémon characters by National Pokedex number, obtained at the URL http://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/.

All the scripts and dataset files can be found in the author's GitHub repository available at the URL https://github.com/hmcuesta/PDA_Book/tree/master/Chapter3/.

CSV

CSV is a very simple and common open format for table, such as data, which can be exported and imported by most of the data analysis tools. CSV is a plain text format this means that the file is a sequence of characters, with no data that has to be interpreted instead, for example, binary numbers.

There are many ways to parse a CSV file from Python, and in a moment we will discuss two of them:

The first eight...