Practical Data Wrangling

Introducing the JSON file format

If you have worked with an Excel spreadsheet, you are already familiar with one type of data file. A spreadsheet is an example of data with a tabular format. In a tabular dataset, the entries are arranged as a series of rows and columns, where each column represents a data variable and each row represents a data entry. In Chapter 4, Reading, Exploring, and Modifying Data - Part II, you will work with CSV files, a form of tabular data.

The dataset for this chapter uses the JSON file format. JSON is an example of a hierarchical data format. Hierarchical data is more free-form than tabular data, though usually a JSON dataset will contain a series of data entries with a fixed structure.

JSON has two structures ...