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CSV

A CSV (comma-separated values) is a plain-text file that holds a table: one row per line, with commas between the columns.

The first line usually holds the column names:

text
country,continent,year
Chile,Americas,2007

Almost every tool reads one: Excel, R's read.csv(), Stata's import delimited and pandas' pd.read_csv(). A CSV is just text, so it carries no types. pandas works out each column's type as it loads the file, and df.dtypes shows what it decided.

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Related terms

  • pandas

    pandas is a Python package for working with tables of data, called DataFrames: loading them, filtering rows, picking columns and summarizing them.

  • Path

    A path is a file's address on your computer: the folders you go through to reach it, ending in the file's name, like projects/python-for-altair/life_expectancy.csv.

All terms