A data file, like Python code, is simply a collection of text that follows a set of syntactical rules. In order for a Python program to make use of the data in the data file, it has to be converted to a data structure that can be processed programmatically.

Reading a file typically refers to the process a program uses to collect raw data, while converting data from a raw text format to a data structure is called parsing the data. The term reading a file can also refer to both collecting and parsing data. Usually, there are tools that take care of reading and parsing the data for you. In order to parse the JSON data in this chapter, I will be using Python's built-in json module. As mentioned previously, the structure of Python dictionaries and arrays correspond to the structures of JSON data, so representing JSON data in Python is quite intuitive.