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Welcome back. This lesson introduces the CSV format.

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CSV is an acronym that stands for Comma Separated Values, CSV.

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A file in CSV format is just a text file that follows certain conventions.

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The CSV format says that values are going to be separated by

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commas and it says that every line of the file will have the same structure.

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So, for example, we've got two commas on every line,

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One, two, one, two.

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So, we've got room for three things on each line;

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before the first comma,

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between the first and second and after the second one.

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Usually, you'll have the first line be special to give column names and then afterwards,

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all the rest of the lines are similar to each other.

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They each have values.

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The first value on line two is a name,

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the second value, 98 is a score, A+ plus is a grade.

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The reason this format is nice is that by having this standard format,

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you can have it read into lots of different programs.

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So, I've chosen to name this file grades dot CSV and it's saved on this computer.

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It's saved in this folder.

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On a Mac, when you have a file name that ends in dot CSV,

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unless you've configured your Mac some other way,

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when you try to open it,

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it defaults to thinking that you want to try to open it into an Excel spreadsheet.

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So here, it's taken that and instead of showing it to me as a text file,

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it's chopped it up and actually put

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the first values into column A and the second values in the column B,

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third values into column C. The same CSV format can be read not just by Excel,

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but by all kinds of statistics programs stayed are SPSS and so on.

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You can also open it in Google sheets.

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So, here's my Google Drive folder where I have some of

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my notes for these recordings and I've put that grades,

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that same grades dot csv file here,

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when I double-click on it,

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it gives me a little preview of what it would look like and it gives me

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an option to open it with Google sheets which is just another spreadsheet program.

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It's doing its little conversion and now we see it again in columns.

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So, the CSV format is kind of an interchange format.

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It's just a text file but if you follow

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the conventions and have the same number of commas on

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each line then it's going to be possible for a file to be read by any of these programs.

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At the end of this lesson,

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you'll be able to read a text file whose contents are in

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CSV format and pass the lines by using the dot split method.

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You'll be able to write a text file whose contents are in CSV format

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using either the dot format method with the string template or the dot join method.

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See you at the end of the lesson when I'll

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explain the difference between a cut and a comma.