Exploring data sources

Data can be obtained from a variety of sources, such as files on your computer, files on your company network, files in the cloud (such as Amazon AWS S3 storage), and web sources. You saw CSV files that contain data as text in the previous chapter. Now, let's consider different types of data that may appear in files.

Text files and binary files

You are already familiar with text files. A simple definition, albeit a bit circular, is that if you can open, read, and understand data in a text editor (such as Notepad on Windows, Notepad++, or other similar applications), you are dealing with text data. For example, in Chapter 2, Data Structures, you worked with small files that contained sales records of pet foods. If you open dog_food_orders.csv (located in the Chapter02/Datasets folder) in a text editor (here, Notepad in Windows), you will see the following:

Figure 3.3 – The dog_food_orders.csv file as a text file

Here...