Practical Data Wrangling

Introducing a basic data wrangling work flow

This chapter is about understanding the components of a program that processes data. As mentioned in the introduction, the approach taken here will be to process data on a basic level. A particular emphasis is placed on opening, reading and writing data in this chapter. Later chapters will focus more on exploration and modification of data.

The following is a basic work flow for data wrangling that applies to processing data files. Data wrangling is not necessarily a linear process, but these steps will help to give a frame of reference for the range of tools and approaches that will be demonstrated in this chapter and throughout the rest of the book.

1. Open the file containing the input data from ...