The pandas I/O API is a set of top level reader functions accessed like pd.read_csv() that generally return a pandasobject.
- read_csv
- read_excel
- read_hdf
- read_sql
- read_json
- read_msgpack (experimental)
- read_html
- read_gbq (experimental)
- read_stata
- read_sas
- read_clipboard
- read_pickle
The corresponding writer functions are object methods that are accessed like df.to_csv()
Here is an informal performance comparison for some of these IO methods.