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

Reading Data from XML


XML, or Extensible Markup Language, is a web markup language that's similar to HTML but with significant flexibility (on the part of the user) built in, such as the ability to define your own tags. It was one of the most hyped technologies in the 1990s and early 2000s. It is a meta-language, that is, a language that allows us to define other languages using its mechanics, such as RSS, MathML (a mathematical markup language widely used for web publication and the display of math-heavy technical information), and so on. XML is also heavily used in regular data exchanges over the web, and as a data wrangling professional, you should have enough familiarity with its basic features to tap into the data flow pipeline whenever you need to extract data for your project.

Exercise 87: Creating an XML File and Reading XML Element Objects

Let's create some random data to understand the XML data format better. Type in the following code snippets:

  1. Create an XML file using the following...