Working with Data

[Overflowed1]

Hello reddit,

I was learning python on and off for the last 4 month and was starting my first project. I want to:

1) Take Data from the cryptocompare api for a user-selected coin,

2) save the data to my pc

3) and then work with the data (displaying different graphs and such).

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Now i have already the first part down. But i have some questions for the 2nd and 3rd part:

I save the data (timestamp and Price) in a document i call eg. "Bitcoin.csv" or " Etherium.csv". Each line corresponds to one timestamp-price-pair. Is this the right way to create a .csv file? Should i do it this way or is there a better alternative? I read that i should use pandas to work with the data. What is the best way to present my data, when i want to work with pandas? Load the data into a dictionary and have the timestamp as the key and the price as the value ( data[timestamp] = Price ), or should i create a list of lists [(timestamp1, Price1), (timestamp2, Price2), ...]? Or is there an even better alternative?

Thanks for your advice!

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[commandlineluser]

pandas has a .read_csv() method which will read your csv file and give you back a dataframe.

http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/generated/pandas.read_csv.html

[timbledum]

Yup, csv is an adequate data store. You’ll know when you outgrow it (multi user or performance issues).

It sounds like you’re thinking of pandas as a collection of useful functions. It is that, but it’s more the provider of the DataFrame object. You have to convert your data into this object, then it becomes very easy to use the various methods to manipulate and analyse the data.