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Working With Data on the Web
Reference

Getting Data

  • Many sites make data available for download via URLs that are formatted in specific ways.
  • Use the requests library to download data in Python programs.

Handling CSV Data

  • Use the io library to treat text as input or output files.
  • Use the csv library to read comma-separated values.

Generalizing and Handling Errors

  • Write tests.

Visualization

  • Use the pyplot library from matplotlib for simple visualizations.
  • Viewing data is often the first step toward understanding it.

Publishing Data

  • Publish data by putting files with predictable names in a publicly-accessible location.

Making Data Findable

  • Create a machine-readable index to explicitly tell people what data sets are available.

Glossary

Representational State Transfer (REST): : a set of patterns for sharing data on the web.

comma-separated values (CSV): : A common textual representation for tables in which the values in each row are separated by commas.

escape sequence: : A sequence of characters used to represent another character. For example, the two-letter escape sequence \n represents a newline character in Python, while the multi-letter escape sequence & respresents an ampersand in HTML.

index: : A document or data set that contains information about, and pointers to, actual data sets. An index contains the metadata that makes actual data findable.

silent failure: : Failing without producing any warning messages. Silent failures are hard to detect and debug.

status code: : A numerical value that indicates whether a function or other procedure succeeded, or if it failed, why.

unit testing tool: : A software library and associated tool or tools that helps programmers write short tests for their code and run them systematically.