Book Image

Data Wrangling with Python

By : Dr. Tirthajyoti Sarkar, Shubhadeep Roychowdhury
Book Image

Data Wrangling with Python

By: Dr. Tirthajyoti Sarkar, Shubhadeep Roychowdhury

Overview of this book

For data to be useful and meaningful, it must be curated and refined. Data Wrangling with Python teaches you the core ideas behind these processes and equips you with knowledge of the most popular tools and techniques in the domain. The book starts with the absolute basics of Python, focusing mainly on data structures. It then delves into the fundamental tools of data wrangling like NumPy and Pandas libraries. You'll explore useful insights into why you should stay away from traditional ways of data cleaning, as done in other languages, and take advantage of the specialized pre-built routines in Python. This combination of Python tips and tricks will also demonstrate how to use the same Python backend and extract/transform data from an array of sources including the Internet, large database vaults, and Excel financial tables. To help you prepare for more challenging scenarios, you'll cover how to handle missing or wrong data, and reformat it based on the requirements from the downstream analytics tool. The book will further help you grasp concepts through real-world examples and datasets. By the end of this book, you will be confident in using a diverse array of sources to extract, clean, transform, and format your data efficiently.
Table of Contents (12 chapters)
Data Wrangling with Python
Preface
Appendix

Introduction


So far in this book, we have focused on learning pandas DataFrame objects as the main data structure for the application of wrangling techniques. Now, we will learn about various techniques by which we can read data into a DataFrame from external sources. Some of those sources could be text-based (CSV, HTML, JSON, and so on), whereas some others could be binary (Excel, PDF, and so on), that is, not in ASCII format. In this chapter, we will learn how to deal with data that is present in web pages or HTML documents. This holds very high importance in the work of a data practitioner.

Note

Since we have gone through a detailed example of basic operations with NumPy and pandas, in this chapter, we will often skip trivial code snippets such as viewing a table, selecting a column, and plotting. Instead, we will focus on showing code examples for the new topics we aim to learn about here.