Reading Data from Different Formats

The next challenge that we face is reading each of the file formats provided by our client containing the data of the observations of the rubber ducks from around the world. We already know that some of these files will be in structured formats, namely comma-separated values (CSV) and JavaScript Object Notation (JSON). To read these structured files, we will need to make use of external libraries to quickly process the data contained within and turn this into the data structures that we can process later. There are many choices of libraries, each with different strengths, but very few have consistent interfaces. Thus, we must define our own interface that is consistent and allows us to hide the details of how each file format is parsed and turned into data.

In this chapter, we will choose the libraries that we are going to use and see how to use them. Then we will define the data structures (continuing our discussion from Chapter 7) and construct...