Reading Tabular Data with Python

Plain text files can hold neatly structured rows and columns. This Block shows you how to open them with Python, read one row at a time, handle headers, access fields by position or name, and turn numeric text into values you can calculate with.

What you will learn:

• Recognize headers, rows, columns, and individual fields
• Open tabular data safely with with open(..., newline="")
• Process parsed rows as lists using indexes
• Access fields by their header names with DictReader()
• Convert numeric fields with int() and float()
• Handle quoted values that contain commas correctly

By the end, you will be able to turn a simple text-based table into useful Python data and build small reports from its contents.