We mentioned in Chapter 1, What is Text Analysis, that we will be using Python throughout the book because it is an easy-to-use and powerful language. In this chapter, we will substantiate these claims, while also providing a revision course in basic Python for text analysis.
Why is this important? While we expect readers of the book to have a background in Python and high-school level math, it is still possible that it's been a while since you've written Python code – and even if you have, the Python code you write during text analysis and string manipulation is quite different from, say, building a website using the web framework Django. Following are the topics we will cover in this chapter:
- Why Python?
- Text manipulation in Python
