CHAPTER 5

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Processing Text Files

Text Is Everywhere

A considerable amount of the data we process is text-based. Viewed from a simplistic approach, text files are files that contain characters. The Python scripts we write are text files. The HTML files our web browser receives are text files. The e-mail messages we read are text files. They’re simply everywhere. Because of the abundance of text files, you’re likely to analyze data that comes in some form of a text file.

But in reality, there’s no difference between a text file and another file, say, a binary file. They’re both just files that occupy space on your hard drive. The important difference ...

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