How to open a .data file extension

Question

I am working on side stuff where the data provided is in a .data file. How do I open a .data file to see what the data looks like and also how do I read from a .data file programmatically through python? I have Mac OSX

NOTE: The Data I am working with is for one of the KDD cup challenges

`.data` is not a standard format afaik. Open it in notepad to see if it's human readable. If not, try a hex-editor, although if it's binary data, you'll want to ask whoever is providing the file what the format is. — Blorgbeard, Aug 03 '15 at 21:28
@Blorgbeard I have a mac with me and I tried to open it in sublime-text but it does not open — Jason Donnald, Aug 03 '15 at 21:29
It doesn't open at all? I'd expect it to display a bunch of junk at least. — Blorgbeard, Aug 03 '15 at 21:31
Uh ok if it's for a challenge, read the instructions. I'm sure they give you information on the format. — Blorgbeard, Aug 03 '15 at 21:32
@Blorgbeard no it doesn't provide any information as the challenge is from previous years(KDD 2009) — Jason Donnald, Aug 03 '15 at 21:38
Open the Terminal, and type `file /path/to/somefile.data` that should give you a hint. — Burhan Khalid, Aug 03 '15 at 21:49
@BurhanKhalid when I do that I get ` ASCII text, with very long lines, with CRLF line terminators` and nothing happens after that — Jason Donnald, Aug 03 '15 at 22:03
That tells you its a normal text file, so just open it with `open('filename.data', 'r')` — Burhan Khalid, Aug 03 '15 at 22:12

score 3 · Answer 1 · edited Oct 11 '20 at 14:07

3

Kindly try using Notepad or Gedit to check delimiters in the file (.data files are text files too). After you have confirmed this, then you can use the read_csv method in the Pandas library in python.

import pandas as pd
file_path = "~/AI/datasets/wine/wine.data"
# above .data file is comma delimited
wine_data = pd.read_csv(file_path, delimiter=",")

edited Oct 11 '20 at 14:07

aalbagarcia

1,019
7
20

answered Oct 10 '20 at 17:05

mustious

51
4

score 1 · Answer 2 · edited May 23 '17 at 10:31

It vastly depends on what is in it. It could be a binary file or it could be a text file.

If it is a text file then you can open it in the same way you open any file (f=open(filename,"r"))

If it is a binary file you can just add a "b" to the open command (open(filename,"rb")). There is an example here:

Reading binary file in Python and looping over each byte

Depending on the type of data in there, you might want to try passing it through a csv reader (csv python module) or an xml parsing library (an example of which is lxml)

After further into from above and looking at the page the format is:

Data Format The datasets use a format similar as that of the text export format from relational databases:

One header lines with the variables names One line per instance Separator tabulation between the values There are missing values (consecutive tabulations)

Therefore see this answer:

parsing a tab-separated file in Python

I would advise trying to process one line at a time rather than loading the whole file, but if you have the ram why not...

I suspect it doesnt open in sublime because the file is huge, but that is just a guess.

I tried to do `f=open("dataset.data","r")` and got `TypeError: descriptor 'read' of 'file' object needs an argument` error — Jason Donnald, Aug 03 '15 at 22:01

score 0 · Answer 3 · answered Aug 18 '18 at 17:34

To get a quick overview of what the file may content you could do this within a terminal, using strings or cat, for example:

$ strings file.data

or

$ cat -v file.data

In case you forget to pass the -v option to cat and if is a binary file you could mess your terminal and therefore need to reset it:

$ reset

score 0 · Answer 4 · answered Feb 05 '21 at 18:55

I was just dealing with this issue myself so I thought I would share my answer. I have a .data file and was unable to open it by simply right clicking it. MACOS recommended I open it using Xcode so I tried it but it did not work.

Next I tried open it using a program named "Brackets". It is a text editing program primarily used for HTML and CSS. Brackets did work.

I also tried PyCharm as I am a Python Programmer. Pycharm worked as well and I was also able to read from the file using the following lines of code:

inf = open("processed-1.cleveland.data", "r")

lines = inf.readlines()

for line in lines:
    print(line, end="")

score 0 · Answer 5 · answered Jun 19 '21 at 11:52

0

It works for me.

import pandas as pd
# define your file path here
your_data = pd.read_csv(file_path, sep=',')
your_data.head()

I mean that just take it as a csv file if it is seprated with ','. solution from @mustious.

answered Jun 19 '21 at 11:52

laguarage

1

How to open a .data file extension

5 Answers5