Practical Data Wrangling

Understanding the CSV format

CSV, which stands for comma-separated value, is a file format used to store tabular data. As you may have guessed, a CSV file consists of text values that are separated by commas.

In a CSV file, each data entry is represented by a single line. (Another way of thinking about this is that each line is separated by a newline '\n' character, though newline characters are invisible in most text editors.)

By convention, the first row in a CSV file contains the column headers, or the names attributed to each column. In each subsequent row, the position of each value corresponds to the data variable to which that value belongs. In other words, the first value in a row corresponds to the first column header, the second ...