grep.md

Searching text data

So we've cleaned our data set, but how do we find entries that use a particular term?

Let's say I want to find all the entries in our data set that use the term "Paris."

$ cat nypl_items.csv | grep -i "paris"
[...]

This will print out all the lines that contain the word "Paris." (The -i flag makes the command ignore capitalization.) Let's use our wc -l command to see how many lines that is:

$ $ cat nypl_items.csv | grep -i "paris" | wc -l
191

Challenge

Use the grep command to explore our .csv file a bit. What areas are best covered by the data set?

Before we finish...

Before you leave today, let's prepare for the next session by organizing your projects folder on your desktop. First, in your projects folder, create a new folder for each of our workshops and one for our cheat sheet:

$ pwd
/Users/patrick/Desktop/projects
$ mkdir git
$ mkdir python
$ mkdir databases
$ mkdir cheatsheet

Then move your cheat-sheet.txt file into your git folder and your nypl_items.csv into your databases folder with the mv command:

$ mv cheat-sheet.txt git
$ mv nypl_items.csv databases

What next?

That's the end of the command line session, but if you want to continue to learn about the command line, take a look at the other useful commands or additional challenges.

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