Import Kaggle Datasets into Google Colab

Introduction

Google Colab offers a powerful Python environment with free access to GPUs, ideal for machine learning and data analysis tasks. If you're working with datasets from Kaggle, you can easily connect the two platforms using the Kaggle API.

In this guide, we'll show you how to import Kaggle datasets into Google Colab in five simple steps.

Step 1: Get Your Kaggle API Key

1. Log in to your Kaggle account at kaggle.com
2. Scroll to the API section inside Settings tab ( click your profile picture at right )
3. Click on "Create New API Token"
4. This downloads a file named kaggle.json to your computer

Step 2: Upload kaggle.json to Colab

Use the below code in your Colab notebook to upload the kaggle.json file.

from google.colab import files
files.upload()  # Choose kaggle.json when prompted

Step 3: Configure API Access

Move the file to the correct location and set permissions:

# Create the directory if it doesn't exist
!mkdir -p ~/.kaggle

# Move kaggle.json to the correct directory. Assumes kaggle.json is in the current working directory.
# If your kaggle.json is in a different location, please update the path below.
!mv kaggle.json ~/.kaggle/

# Set permissions for the kaggle.json file
!chmod 600 ~/.kaggle/kaggle.json

Step 4: Download a Dataset

Go to the Kaggle dataset page and copy the dataset name from the URL. For example, for:

kagglehub.dataset_download("yasserh/titanic-dataset")

The dataset path is: yasserh/titanic-dataset

Use the command below to download:

!kaggle datasets download -d yasserh/titanic-dataset

Step 5: Unzip and Load the Dataset

!unzip -q titanic-dataset.zip

# Remove the zip file after extraction
!rm titanic-dataset.zip

# Remove other metadata files if they exist and are not needed
!rm -f titanic-dataset.zip.json

import pandas as pd
df = pd.read_csv("Titanic-Dataset.csv")
df.head()

# Get the total number of rows and columns
num_rows, num_cols = df.shape

print(f"Total number of rows: {num_rows}")
print(f"Total number of columns: {num_cols}")

Subhendu Mohapatra

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