How to Read a Text File with a Delimiter in Python Pandas

Working with data is an integral part of data science and programming. This tutorial will guide you on how to read a text file with a delimiter using Python Pandas. Pandas is a powerful data manipulation library in Python, widely used for data preprocessing.

Step 1: Import Necessary Libraries

In this step, we will import Python’s Pandas library. If you have not installed the Pandas library already, you can do that by using Python’s pip package manager. Since our focus is not on how to install these libraries, you can refer to the Pandas installation guide for clear steps.

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import pandas as pd

Step 2: Prepare a Delimited Text File

For this tutorial, we will make use of a sample text file with the following content. The file’s called data.txt, and it employs a comma as a delimiter:

Name,Age,Profession
John,30,Developer
Emma,25,Designer
Mike,35,Architect

Step 3: Read the Text File

Now with the file ready, we can employ the read_csv() function from pandas to read the text file.

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data = pd.read_csv('data.txt')

Step 4: Display the Data

To display the content of the file that we have read, we simply use the print() function:

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print(data)

The output is as follows:

  Name  Age  Profession
0  John  30  Developer
1  Emma  25  Designer
2  Mike  35  Architect

Complete Code

Below is the complete code that reads a text file using Pandas:

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import pandas as pd
 
# Read the data file
data = pd.read_csv('data.txt')
 
# Print the data
print(data)

Conclusion

In this tutorial, you have learned how to read a text file with a delimiter using Python’s Pandas library. This functionality is incredibly useful in many scenarios since most of the datasets you’ll be working with as a data scientist will be stored in files.

With just a few lines of code, you can have your data loaded into a Pandas DataFrame where you can begin your data exploration and analysis.