data loadingstorageand file formats the tools in this book are of little use if you can' easily import and export data in python ' going to be focused on input and output with pandas objectsthough there are of course numerous tools in other libraries to aid in this process numpyfor examplefeatures low-level but extremely fast binary data loading and storageincluding support for memory-mapped array see for more on those input and output typically falls into few main categoriesreading text files and other more efficient on-disk formatsloading data from databasesand interacting with network sources like web apis reading and writing data in text format python has become beloved language for text and file munging due to its simple syntax for interacting with filesintuitive data structuresand convenient features like tuple packing and unpacking pandas features number of functions for reading tabular data as dataframe object table - has summary of all of themthough read_csv and read_table are likely the ones you'll use the most table - parsing functions in pandas function description read_csv load delimited data from fileurlor file-like object use comma as default delimiter read_table load delimited data from fileurlor file-like object use tab ('\ 'as default delimiter read_fwf read data in fixed-width column format (that isno delimitersread_clipboard version of read_table that reads data from the clipboard useful for converting tables from web pages www it-ebooks info