Book Image

Practical Data Wrangling

By : Allan Visochek
Book Image

Practical Data Wrangling

By: Allan Visochek

Overview of this book

Around 80% of time in data analysis is spent on cleaning and preparing data for analysis. This is, however, an important task, and is a prerequisite to the rest of the data analysis workflow, including visualization, analysis and reporting. Python and R are considered a popular choice of tool for data analysis, and have packages that can be best used to manipulate different kinds of data, as per your requirements. This book will show you the different data wrangling techniques, and how you can leverage the power of Python and R packages to implement them. You’ll start by understanding the data wrangling process and get a solid foundation to work with different types of data. You’ll work with different data structures and acquire and parse data from various locations. You’ll also see how to reshape the layout of data and manipulate, summarize, and join data sets. Finally, we conclude with a quick primer on accessing and processing data from databases, conducting data exploration, and storing and retrieving data quickly using databases. The book includes practical examples on each of these points using simple and real-world data sets to give you an easier understanding. By the end of the book, you’ll have a thorough understanding of all the data wrangling concepts and how to implement them in the best possible way.
Table of Contents (16 chapters)
Title Page
Credits
About the Author
About the Reviewer
www.PacktPub.com
Customer Feedback
Preface

Chapter 4. Reading, Exploring, and Modifying Data - Part II

In the previous chapter, you learned how to apply Python programming to the task of processing data from external files. This chapter will build on the skills covered in the previous chapter with an introduction to the XML and CSV data formats. In addition to python's built-in tools for handling CSV and XML files, I will also cover pandas, which is a popular framework for working with tabular data. This chapter will include the following sections:

  • Logistical overview 
  • Understanding the CSV format
  • Introducing the csv module 
  • Using the csv module to read and process CSV data
  • Using the csv module to write CSV data
  • Using the pandas module to read and process data
  • Handling non-standard CSV encoding and dialect
  • Understanding XML
  • Using the xml.etree.ElementTree module to parse XML data