The CSV format is exactly as advertised: It’s just a text file of comma-separated values. CSV files are widely supported by many types of programs, can be viewed in text editors (including IDLE’s file editor), and are a straightforward way to represent spreadsheet data. The advantage of CSV files is simplicity. (JSON is short for JavaScript Object Notation.) You don’t need to know the JavaScript programming language to use JSON files, but the JSON format is useful to know because it’s used in many web applications.ĭon’t have types for their values-everything is a stringĭon’t have settings for font size or colorĬan’t have images or charts embedded in them

JSON (pronounced “JAY-sawn” or “Jason”-it doesn’t matter how because either way people will say you’re pronouncing it wrong) is a format that stores information as JavaScript source code in plaintext files. Python’s csv module makes it easy to parse CSV files. But Python also comes with the special csv and json modules, each providing functions to help you work with these file formats.ĬSV stands for “comma-separated values,” and CSV files are simplified spreadsheets stored as plaintext files. You can view them in a text editor, such as IDLE’s file editor. CSV and JSON files, on the other hand, are just plaintext files.

These files were in a binary format, which required special Python modules to access their data. In Chapter 13, you learned how to extract text from PDF and Word documents.

Python script to convert json to csv