CS 111

Fall 2016

Introduction to Computer Science

Lab10: Data manipulation

Data science is all the rage these days. In experimental sciences, one might collect lots of data, put numbers into a big spreadsheet, and need to make sense of all that information. It is surprisingly common for scientists in all kinds of fields to store data in a text-based format (one entry per line, delineated with commas or tabs).

A few weeks ago, a biologist friend of mine working at the National Institutes of Health sent me a data file and asked me to help extract some data. (True story.) I used my computer science expertise to perform a series of tasks in service of (real) science.

In this lab, we will go through some exercises, culminating with one of those actual tasks.

• data0.py -- an example of destructive functions
• data1.py -- getting unique elements of a list
• data2.py -- fetch a file over the Internet
• data3.py -- manipulating data