Preparing a CSV spreadsheet

As we saw in the previous chapter, CSV files are files containing tabular data defined as a collection of rows with defined columns, separated by commas. They are a very common format for all kinds of data. We will see in this recipe how to extract data from log files and store the information in a CSV file.

Getting ready

We will use a similar log format as the one introduced in the Extracting data from structured strings recipe in Chapter 1, Let's Begin Our Automation Journey:

[<Timestamp>] - SALE - PRODUCT: <product id> - PRICE: <price>

Each line will represent a sale log.

We will use the parse module. We should install the module, adding it to our requirements.txt file as follows:

$ echo "parse==1.14.0" >> requirements.txt
$ pip install -r requirements.txt

In the GitHub repository, there are some log files to process with the following structure:

sale_logs/
  OH
    logs.txt
  ON...