Numerical Computing with Python

The pandas way

Similar to Numpy, pandas offers an easy way to load text files into a pandas dataframe:

import pandas as pdpd.read_csv(usecols=1)

Here the separation can be denoted by either sep or delimiter, which is set as comma , by default (CSV stands for comma-separated values).

There is a long list of less commonly used options available as to determine how different data formats, data types, and errors should be handled. You may refer to the documentation at http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/generated/pandas.read_csv.html. Besides flat CSV files, Pandas also has other built-in functions for reading other common data formats, such as Excel, JSON, HTML, HDF5, SQL, and Google BigQuery.

To stay focused on data visualization, ...