In this chapter, we learned many different ways to convert data from one format to another. Some of these techniques are simple, such as just saving a file in the format you want or looking for a menu option to output the correct format. At other times, we will need to write our own programmatic solution.

Many projects, such as the sample project we implemented in this chapter, will require several different cleaning steps, and we will have to carefully plan out our cleaning steps and write down what we did. Both networkx and D3 are really nifty tools, but they do require data to be in a certain format before we are ready to use them. Likewise, Facebook data is easily available through netvizz, but it too has its own data format. Finding easy ways to convert from one file format to the other is a critical skill in data science.

In this chapter, we performed a lot of conversions between structured and semistructured data. But what about cleaning messy data, such as unstructured text...