Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By : Steven F. Lott
Book Image

Modern Python Cookbook - Second Edition

By: Steven F. Lott

Overview of this book

Python is the preferred choice of developers, engineers, data scientists, and hobbyists everywhere. It is a great language that can power your applications and provide great speed, safety, and scalability. It can be used for simple scripting or sophisticated web applications. By exposing Python as a series of simple recipes, this book gives you insight into specific language features in a particular context. Having a tangible context helps make the language or a given standard library feature easier to understand. This book comes with 133 recipes on the latest version of Python 3.8. The recipes will benefit everyone, from beginners just starting out with Python to experts. You'll not only learn Python programming concepts but also how to build complex applications. The recipes will touch upon all necessary Python concepts related to data structures, object oriented programming, functional programming, and statistical programming. You will get acquainted with the nuances of Python syntax and how to effectively take advantage of it. By the end of this Python book, you will be equipped with knowledge of testing, web services, configuration, and application integration tips and tricks. You will be armed with the knowledge of how to create applications with flexible logging, powerful configuration, command-line options, automated unit tests, and good documentation.
Table of Contents (18 chapters)
16
Other Books You May Enjoy
17
Index

Reading delimited files with the CSV module

One commonly used data format is comma-separated values (CSV). We can generalize this to think of the comma character as simply one of many candidate separator characters. For example, a CSV file can use the | character as the separator between columns of data. This generalization for separators other than the comma makes CSV files particularly powerful.

How can we process data in one of the wide varieties of CSV formats?

Getting ready

A summary of a file's content is called a schema. It's essential to distinguish between two aspects of the schema.

The physical format of the file: For CSV, this means the file's bytes encode text. The text is organized into rows and columns using a row separator character (or characters) and a column separator character. Many spreadsheet products will use ,(comma) as the column separator and the \r\n sequence of characters as the row separator. The specific combination of punctuation...