Case 3 – reading data from a URL

Several times, we need to read the data directly from a web URL. This URL might contain the data written in it or might contain a file which has the data. For example, navigate to this website, http://winterolympicsmedals.com/ which lists the medals won by various countries in different sports during the Winter Olympics. Now type the following address in the URL address bar: http://winterolympicsmedals.com/medals.csv.

A CSV file will be downloaded automatically. If you choose to download it manually, saving it and then specifying the directory path for the read_csv method is a time consuming process. Instead, Python allows us to read such files directly from the URL. Apart from the significant saving in time, it is also beneficial to loop over the files when there are many such files to be downloaded and read in.

A simple read_csv statement is required to read the data directly from the URL:

import pandas as pd
medal_data=pd.read_csv('http://winterolympicsmedals...