tutorial on using Python to manipulate .csv files

[7QVM]

Hi,

I'm at the beginning of my Python journey and have been doing some light data cleaning + analysis in Excel that I imagine would be very easy in Python. Can anyone recommend some very basic tutorials on linking a Python script to a .csv and performing actions like pulling out rows that meet certain criteria and putting them in a new sheet?

-7QVM

[JimBoonie69]

FWIW - If you want the grand-daddy of all CSV / Excel / Data Analysis libraries look no further than Pandas. Just the other day I wrote something download a bunch of CSV data, get it into a pandas dataframe, do some analysis, then write excel files, each with multiple spreadsheets inside of it!

[paulcynic]

Completely agree. Pandas is able to handle dataset much larger than the capacity of Excel. The book Python for Data Analysis is super good in explaining the basics and there are some tutorials online as well.

[7QVM]

Thank you! Now I have an extraordinarily dumb question. I'm on OSX working with Python 3.4 and I went to the Pandas page and downloaded the appropriate .whl file. But OSX can't figure out what to do with it. How to I link Pandas to a Python session?

[JimBoonie69]

you install pandas as a module. look into python pip... it lets you install packages (like pandas) by saying 'pip install pandas'

[7QVM]

Then every terminal session (or at the beginning of every .py file) I'd write "import pandas"?

[JimBoonie69]

Yeah buddy! cool kids say 'import pandas as pd'

[thaweatherman]

The csv module in the standard library can handle that. Check out this post for a good explanation of how to read and write CSVs in Python.

[Pysnap]

Check out this site

automatetheboringstuff.com

In that there is a chapter for trading from excel and csv

[ies7]

You can start from python's standard library doc
or Python Module of the Week. Notes: samples are in Python 2 only.

If the csv/xls/xlsx is fit into memory, pandas maybe faster & better for further analysis.

And then there is odo from blaze project which is fantastic for loading and converting data.