data collection data collection is where it all begins though listed as step that comes post business understanding and problem definitiondata collection often happens in parallel this is done in order to assist in augmenting the business understanding process with facts like availabilitypotential valueand so on before complete use case can be formed and worked upon of coursedata collection takes formal and better form once the problem statement is defined and the project gets underway data is at the center of everything around uswhich is tremendous opportunity yet this also presents the fact that it must be present in different formatsshapesand sizes its omnipresence also means that it exists in systems such as legacy machines (say mainframes)web (say web sites and web applications)databasesflat filessensorsmobile devicesand so on let' look at some of the most commonly occurring data formats and ways of collecting such data csv csv data file is one of the most widely available formats of data it is also one of the oldest formats still used and preferred by different systems across domains comma separated values (csvare data files that contain data with each of its attributes delimited by ",( commafigure - depicts quick snapshot of how typical csv file looks the sample csv shows how data is typically arranged it contains attributes of different data types separated/delimited by comma csv may contain an optional header row (as shown in the examplecsvs may also optionally enclose each of the attributes in single or double quotes to better demarcate though usually csvs are used to store tabular datai data in the form of rows and columnsthis is not the only way figure - sample csv file csvs come in different variations and just changing the delimiter to tab makes one tsv (or tab separated valuesfile the basic ideology here is to use unique symbol to delimit/separate different attributes now that we know how csv lookslet' employ some python magic to read/extract this data for use one of the advantages of using language like python is its ability to abstract and handle whole lot of stuff unlike other languages where specific libraries or lot of code is required to get basic stuff donepython handles it with elan along the same lines is reading csv file the simplest way to read csv is through the python csv module this module provides an abstraction function called the reader(