how to import data from a text file into pandas dataframe

Question

I want to read a text file as a pd dataframe , but i don't know which delimiter should i choose to read the data correctly.

Data in the text file looks like this:

---

USAF   WBAN  STATIONNAME   CTRY ST CALL  LAT     LON      ELEV(M) BEGIN    END

007018 99999 WXPOD 7018                  +00.000 +000.000 +7018.0 20110309 20130730

I need to have "STATIONNAME" in one column but what i choose delimiter = ' ' , data in that column will be separated each word in a column and all the data in the file will be messed up.

Any suggestion please !

Answer 1

We can't tell for sure from the picture, but the data may be tab-delimited. If so, you can read the file like this:

df = pd.read_csv('<filename>', sep='\t')

Answer 2

Thank you, I solved the problem using pandas.read_fwf(path,compression='infer') . This command is used to read fixed-width-files.

We can also specify the header using pandas.read_fwf(path,compression='infer',names=header) .