Learn Python by Building Data Science Applications

Working with real data

Let's now try using pandas on real data. In Chapter 7, Scraping Data from the Web with Beautiful Soup 4, we collected a huge dataset of WWII battles and operations—including casualties, armies, dates, and locations. We never explored what is inside the dataset, though, and usually, this kind of data requires intensive processing. Now, let's see what we'll be able to do with this data.

As you may recall, we stored the dataset as a nested .json file. pandas can read from JSON files of different structures, but it won't understand nested data points. At this point, the task for us is straightforward (you may think of writing a recursive function, for example), so we won't discuss this much. If you want, you can check the ...