Editing DS4UX (Spring 2016)/Reading and writing files (section)

== Instructions ==

# If you haven't done so already, [http://jtmorgan.net/ds4ux/week4/lecture.zip download the ZIPPED code and data file] called <code>lecture.zip</code>, unzip it, and navigate to it in your Terminal or Powershell. 
# Open the code and datafiles in that directory in TextWrangler as well, so you can see the code while we walk through it.


=== Notes ===
# The input file we will be working with in this exercise is intentionally messy—it has lots of extra spaces and tabs scattered through the various lines of the file. One of the reasons we're devoting a whole mini-lecture on reading and writing flat files is that the data you want to analyze is OFTEN messy like this when you first get it, and often creating a "clean" version is one of the first things you'll want to do with that data.
# File suffixes (.txt, .tsv, .csv) are in some cases more a matter of ''conventions'' than requirements. If a file is just plain text, Python may not care what its file suffix is: you may be able to read it in and read through it line-by-line whether it has ".txt" on it or now. However, in many cases, Python (like most applications) uses the file suffix to decide how to render/execute a file, so it's best to always use the proper (conventional) suffix for any file database you have: .csv for comma-separated value files, .tsv for tab-separated value files, and .txt for generic text files (or for text files where you don't know or can't guarantee that the structure is complete or consistent)