In this section, we will look at files that contain metadata, the way that data is arranged as well as the values themselves. This includes simple delimited files and also files with additional metadata such as XML and HDF5.
Also, we will introduce the important topic of data arrays and frames in Julia, which is familiar to all R users and also implemented in Python via the pandas module.
Data is often presented in table form as a series of rows representing individual records and fields corresponding to a data value for that particular record. Columns in the table are consistent, in the sense that they may be all integers, floats, dates, and so on,, and are to be considered as the same class of data. This will be familiar to most as it maps similar to the way data is held in a spreadsheet.
One of the oldest forms of such representation of such data is the Comma-Separated-Value (CSV) file. This is essentially an ASCII file in which fields are separated by...
