Welcome to the first lesson of our course on managing data from different datasets. In today's digital world, it's common to encounter large volumes of data. Understanding how to efficiently manage this data, especially when it's compressed, is crucial. This lesson will focus on handling JSON files contained within a zip archive. By the end, you'll be able to extract, read, and process data stored in compressed formats, building a strong foundation for handling real-world datasets.

Before we dive into zip files, let's briefly recall some essentials about JSON and file I/O operations. JSON, or JavaScript Object Notation, is a lightweight data interchange format. It's easy for humans to read and write and easy for machines to parse and generate. In Python, we interact with JSON data using the json module and its dump and load functions.

Zip files are a type of compressed file format that allows you to bundle many files into one. In Python, you work with zip files using the zipfile module, which is preinstalled in Python. This module provides tools to handle zip files without extracting them to a directory.

Here's how you open a zip file using the zipfile.ZipFile() function:

In this example:

• zipfile.ZipFile(zip_file_name, 'r') is used to open the zip file in read ('r') mode.
• The with statement ensures the file is properly closed after we're done with it.

Once the zip file is open, you can list its contents using the namelist() method:

Here, file_list will contain a list of the names of the files within the zip archive.

Before we proceed with parsing data from the universe dataset, let’s discuss the data itself. The dataset contains information about various stars and is provided in a JSON format. Each entry in the array corresponds to a star with details like its name, type, and mass. For instance, the mass field may look like "90.45 × 10^30 kg", indicating the mass in scientific notation. Understanding the structure will help us process and analyze the data efficiently.

Now, let's move on to reading JSON files stored in the zip archive. We begin by opening a specific file from the archive and using the json.load() method.

Here's how you access a JSON file within the zip:

In this code:

• zip_ref.open('stars.json') gives us access to the stars.json file in the archive.
• The json.load() function expects a file object. It reads the file's contents and converts the JSON document into a dictionary we can work with in Python.

Once we've loaded our JSON data, we can analyze it. Let's sort the stars by their mass to find the top 5 most massive ones. While this step is crucial to show the real example of how to work with data, remember that the key information of this lesson is how to open and manage zipped files, so practices of this unit will focus mainly on it.

Note: For this sorting method to work correctly, it's important that the masses of our stars share the same exponential power number, such as 10^30 in our dataset. If they do not, the code will sort incorrectly as it only considers the first float number, not the exponential power. For simplicity, in this unit we will always work with datasets with the same exponential power number for each object.

We'll use the sorted() function along with a custom lambda function to sort by mass:

Explanation:

• key=lambda star: float(star['mass'].split()[0]) ensures we sort by the mass field, converting it into a float for numerical comparison.
• reverse=True sorts the data in descending order.
• most_massive_stars = sorted_stars[:5] extracts the top 5 stars by mass.

Finally, we'll display the top 5 massive stars:

Using a loop, we print each star's name and mass from our sorted list. The output will be formatted in the following manner:

In addition to JSON files, you might encounter other types of files within a zip archive. Reading text files can be done using the zipfile module, just like we did with JSON files. However, a text file reads as a bytes object, which needs to be decoded into a string for further processing.

Here's an example of how to read a text file from a zip archive:

Explanation:

• zip_ref.open('data.txt') gives us access to the data.txt file within the archive.
• txt_file.read() reads the contents of the text file. This data is in bytes format.
• The .decode('utf-8') method is used to convert bytes data into a string. When reading files in binary mode, such as with zip_ref.open(), the data is returned as bytes. To work with this data as a string—necessary for tasks like printing or manipulating text—the bytes need to be decoded into a string using a specific character encoding format, in this case, UTF-8. This decoding process converts the byte sequences into human-readable text.

By using decode('utf-8'), you ensure that the text data is correctly interpreted as a string, allowing you to print and manipulate it as needed.

In addition to JSON and text files, you might encounter CSV files within a zip archive. Reading CSV files can also be done using the zipfile module, in conjunction with the csv module for parsing CSV data.

Here's how to read a CSV file from a zip archive:

Explanation:

• zip_ref.open('data.csv') gives us access to the data.csv file within the archive.
• csv_file.read() reads the contents of the CSV file as bytes.
• The .decode('utf-8') method converts the bytes data into a string.
• .splitlines() is used to split the string into lines, as the csv.reader expects an iterable containing lines of text.
• csv.reader(csv_file) creates a CSV reader object which can iterate over lines (rows) in the provided file-like object.
• We loop through the csv_reader to access each row in the CSV, allowing for further processing or simply printing them, as demonstrated.

This approach effectively reads and processes CSV data files contained in a zip archive for analysis or manipulation.

In this lesson, we covered how to use the zipfile and json modules to manage data stored in a compressed format. You learned to open and read JSON files from a zip archive and to process the data by sorting it based on specific criteria. The skills you’ve gained here will be invaluable as you tackle more complex data handling tasks. Now, you're ready to apply these concepts in the upcoming practice exercises, where you'll get hands-on experience with data extraction and analysis from compressed datasets. Let's move forward with confidence.