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

The Basics of Web Scraping and the Beautiful Soup Library


In today's connected world, one of the most valued and widely used skill for a data wrangling professional is the ability to extract and read data from web pages and databases hosted on the web. Most organizations host data on the cloud (public or private), and the majority of web microservices these days provide some kind of API for the external users to access data:

Figure 7.1: Data wrangling HTTP request and an XML/JSON reply

It is necessary that, as a data wrangling engineer, you know about the structure of web pages and Python libraries so that you are able to extract data from a web page. The World Wide Web is an ever-growing, ever-changing universe, in which different data exchange protocols and formats are used. A few of these are widely used and have become standard.

Libraries in Python

Python comes equipped with built-in modules, such as urllib 3, which that can place HTTP requests over the internet and receive data from the...