Python equivalent to R data frames

Question

What is the Python equivalent to R's read.csv() function, and the data.frame it returns?

Is there a similar data structure in Python?

Answer 1

Your have two elements in your question, (1) reading/writing CSV and (2) an equivalent data structure to the R data.frame that results from reading in a CSV-file.

For the first part, there is the csv module in the standard library.

For the second part, the standard library is lacking a equivalent tabular data structure with the flexibility of the the R data.frame. You have two options, depending on the complexity of the operations you will be doing afterwards:

• A more lightweight option is tablib. It contains functions for reading/writing CSV and basic manipulations, sub-setting, etc.
• A more comprehensive (perhaps overkill) solution is the DataFrame data structure in the pandas package. It has similar read/write functions for tabular fileformats, but has indexing/slicing, manipulation, built-in summary operations, etc. simmilar to the the R data.frame.