Reading The Data and Getting Top Rated movies

The data in the movie lens database will be in plaintext separated by |, it will not have column headers like Excel files. This means that we’ll have to provide our own column headers. pandas has a function that reads plaintext files, which is similar to NumPy’s read file functions that we covered in a previous lesson.

Let’s look at the code.

user_columns = ['user_id', 'age', 'sex']

We’ll declare user_columns for the three entries we want to read from u.user.

Note: u.user has more than three entries per row, but we’ll ignore the others.

users = pd.read_csv('u.user', sep='|', names=user_columns, usecols=range(3))

We’ll use the read_csv() function to read the file, even though it isn’t technically a CSV ...