Cleaning Data for Effective Data Science

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Repurposing Data Sources

All language is but a poor translation.

–Franz Kafka

Sometimes, data lives in formats that take extra work to ingest. For common and explicitly data-oriented formats, common libraries already have readers built into them. Data frame libraries, for example, read a huge number of different file types. At worst, slightly less common formats have their own more specialized libraries that provide a relatively straightforward path between the original format and the general purpose data processing library you wish to use.

A greater difficulty often arises because a given format is not per se a data format, but exists for a different purpose. Nonetheless, often there is data somehow embedded or encoded in the format that ...