Data manipulating environment

I am looking for something* to aid me in manipulating and interpreting data. Data of the names, addresses an开发者_StackOverflow社区d that sorts.

Currently, I am making heavy use of Python to find whether one piece of information relate to another, but I am noticing that a lot of my code could easily be substituted with some sort of Query Language.

Mainly, I need an environment where I can import data in any format, be it xml, html, csv, or excel or database files. And I wish for the software to read it and tell me what columns there are etc., so that I can only worry about writing code that interprets it.

Does this sound concrete enough, if so, anyone in possession of such elegant software?

*Can be a programming language, IDE, combination of those.

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Have you looked at the Pandas module in Python? http://pandas.pydata.org/pandas-docs/stable/ When combined with Ipython notebook, it makes a great data manipulation platform.

I think it may let you do a lot of what you want to do. I am not sure how well it handles html, but it's built to handle csv, excel and database files