Dictionaries
Making dictionaries
Dictionary operations
Example: Polynomials as dictionaries
Dictionaries with default values and ordering
Example: Storing file data in dictionaries
Example: Storing file data in nested dictionaries
Example: Reading and plotting data recorded at specific dates
Strings
Common operations on strings
Example: Reading pairs of numbers
Example: Reading coordinates
Reading data from web pages
About web pages
How to access web pages in programs
Example: Reading pure text files
Example: Extracting data from HTML
Handling non-English text
Reading and writing spreadsheet files
CSV files
Reading CSV files
Processing spreadsheet data
Writing CSV files
Representing number cells with Numerical Python arrays
Using more high-level Numerical Python functionality
Making code that is compatible with Python 2 and 3
Basic differences between Python 2 and 3
Turning Python 2 code into Python 3 code
Summary
Chapter topics
Example: A file database
Exercises
Exercise 1: Make a dictionary from a table
Exercise 2: Explore syntax differences: lists vs. dicts
Exercise 3: Use string operations to improve a program
Exercise 4: Interpret output from a program
Exercise 5: Make a dictionary
Exercise 6: Make a nested dictionary
Exercise 7: Make a nested dictionary from a file
Exercise 8: Make a nested dictionary from a file
Exercise 9: Compute the area of a triangle
Exercise 10: Compare data structures for polynomials
Exercise 11: Compute the derivative of a polynomial
Exercise 12: Specify functions on the command line
Exercise 13: Interpret function specifications
Exercise 14: Compare average temperatures in cities
Exercise 15: Generate an HTML report with figures
References
The present chapter addresses many techniques for interpreting information in files and storing the data in convenient Python objects for further data analysis. A particularly handy object for many purposes is the dictionary, which maps objects to objects, very often strings to various kinds of data that later can be looked up through the strings. The section Dictionaries is devoted to dictionaries.
Information in files often appear as pure text, so to interpret and extract data from files it is sometimes necessary to carry out sophisticated operations on the text. Python strings have many methods for performing such operations, and the most important functionality is described in the section Strings.
The World Wide Web is full of information and scientific data that may be useful to access from a program. The section Reading data from web pages tells you how to read web pages from a program and interpret the contents using string operations.
Working with data often involves spreadsheets. Python programs not only need to extract data from spreadsheet files, but it can be advantageous and convenient to actually to the data processing in a Python program rather than in a spreadsheet program like Microsoft Excel or LibreOffice. The section Reading and writing spreadsheet files goes through relevant techniques for reading and writing files in the common CSV format for spreadsheets.
The present chapter builds on fundamental programming concepts such as
loops, lists, arrays, if tests, command-line arguments, and curve
plotting. The folder src/files contains all
the relevant program example files and associated data files.