Data Formats

How to work with diverse and unknown data formats.

Format Detection

Always inspect before parsing:

file <filename>                    # MIME type detection
xxd <filename> | head -5           # hex dump (first bytes)
head -3 <filename>                 # text preview
python3 -c "
with open('<filename>', 'rb') as f:
    h = f.read(16)
    print(h, h.hex())
"

Common Formats

Binary

• Magic bytes: Most binary formats start with a signature (ELF: \x7fELF, PNG: \x89PNG)
• Endianness: Check if little-endian or big-endian (struct.unpack('<I', ...) vs '>I')
• Alignment: Fields are often aligned to 4 or 8 bytes
• Offsets: Binary headers often contain offsets to other sections

Structured text

• CSV/TSV: Check delimiter (comma, tab, pipe), quoting, header row
• JSON: python3 -c "import json; json.load(open('f'))"
• YAML: Check indentation, anchors/aliases
• TOML: python3 -c "import tomllib; ..."
• XML: Check encoding declaration, namespaces

Checkpoints / Model files

• PyTorch: .pt, .pth → torch.load(f, map_location='cpu')
• TensorFlow: .ckpt → index + data files, use tf.train.load_checkpoint()
• NumPy: .npy, .npz → numpy.load()
• HuggingFace: config.json + model.safetensors
• ONNX: onnx.load()

Database files

• SQLite: file says "SQLite 3.x database" → sqlite3 <file> ".tables"
• WAL files: SQLite write-ahead log — recover with sqlite3 PRAGMA
• CSV dumps: Often need schema inference

Parsing Strategies

Unknown binary format

1. Hex dump first 256 bytes: xxd file | head -16
2. Look for magic bytes, version numbers, string tables
3. Check file size — does it suggest a pattern? (e.g., N * record_size)
4. Look for documentation of the format online
5. Write a minimal parser, test on known values

Large structured files

1. Never load entirely — sample first: head, tail, shuf -n 10
2. Check consistency: are all lines the same format?
3. Count fields: head -1 file | awk -F',' '{print NF}'
4. Watch for: mixed types, missing values, encoding issues

Multi-file datasets

1. List all files and sizes
2. Look for manifest/index files (often JSON or CSV)
3. Check naming patterns — timestamps, sequence numbers, shards
4. Process one file first, then generalize

Common Pitfalls

• Assuming UTF-8 when the file is Latin-1 or binary
• Assuming CSV when it's TSV (or vice versa)
• Ignoring the header row
• Not handling quoted fields with embedded delimiters
• Reading binary files as text (corrupts data)
• Endianness mismatch (x86 is little-endian, network byte order is big-endian)