Working with Data

In many of the examples we have looked at so far, the data we’ve used was a little artificial, being generated using random numbers. It is now time to consider how Julia uses data held in files. In this chapter, I’m going to concentrate on simple disk-based files and leave discussions of data stored in databases and on the web for later chapters.

We will examine various statistical approaches in Julia, including both the methods integrated into Julia Core and those found in the increasing selection of packages that deal with statistics and related subjects.

Specifically, this chapter will cover the following topics:

• Basic terminal input/output (I/O)
• Handling text and binary files
• Structured datasets
• Time series
• DataFrames
• Simple statistics

We’ll begin by discussing basic I/O.