[Tut] CSV to XML – How to Convert in Python?

CSV to XML – How to Convert in Python?

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Problem Formulation

Input: You have some data in a CSV file stored in 'my_file.csv' where the first row is the header and the remaining rows are values associated to the column names in the header.

Name,Job,Age,Income

Alice,Programmer,23,110000

Bob,Executive,34,90000

Carl,Sales,45,50000

Desired Output: You want to store the data in an XML file 'my_file.xml' so that each row is represented by an XML <row> tag and each column value is associated with a specific column header tag.

<data> <row id='Alice'>

 <Name>Alice</Name>

 <Job>Programmer</Job>

 <Age>23</Age>

 <Income>110000</Income> </row>

 <row id='Bob'>

 <Name>Bob</Name>

 <Job>Executive</Job>

 <Age>34</Age>

 <Income>90000</Income> </row>

 <row id='Carl'>

 <Name>Carl</Name>

 <Job>Sales</Job>

 <Age>45</Age>

 <Income>50000</Income> </row>

</data>

Python CSV to XML – Basic Example

You can convert a CSV to an XML using the following approach:

• Read the whole CSV file into your Python script.
• Store the first row as header data that is needed to name your custom XML tags (e.g., <Name>, <Job>, <Age>, and <Income> in our example).
• Create a function convert_row() that converts each row separately to an XML representation of that row using basic string formatting.
• Iterate over the data row-wise using csv.reader() and convert each CSV row to XML using your function convert_row().

Here’s the code for copy&paste:

# Convert CSV file to XML string

import csv filename = 'my_file.csv' def convert_row(headers, row): s = f'<row id="{row[0]}">\n' for header, item in zip(headers, row): s += f' <{header}>' + f'{item}' + f'</{header}>\n' return s + '</row>' with open(filename, 'r') as f: r = csv.reader(f) headers = next® xml = '<data>\n' for row in r: xml += convert_row(headers, row) + '\n' xml += '</data>' print(xml)

Output:

<data>

<row id="Alice"> <Name>Alice</Name> <Job>Programmer</Job> <Age>23</Age> <Income>110000</Income>

</row>

<row id="Bob"> <Name>Bob</Name> <Job>Executive</Job> <Age>34</Age> <Income>90000</Income>

</row>

<row id="Carl"> <Name>Carl</Name> <Job>Sales</Job> <Age>45</Age> <Income>50000</Income>

</row>

</data>

Yay!

Note that instead of printing to the shell, you could print it to a file if this is what you need. Here’s how:

Learn More: How to print() to a file in Python?

Pandas CSV to XML

You can also use pandas instead of the csv module to read the CSV file into your Python script. Everything else remains similar—I highlighted the lines that have changed in the following code snippet:

import pandas as pd def convert_row(headers, row): s = f'<row id="{row[0]}">\n' for header, item in zip(headers, row): s += f' <{header}>' + f'{item}' + f'</{header}>\n' return s + '</row>' df = pd.read_csv("my_file.csv")

headers = df.columns.tolist()

xml = '<data>\n' for _, row in df.iterrows(): xml += convert_row(headers, row) + '\n' xml += '</data>'

print(xml)

Related CSV Conversion Tutorials

• python convert csv to json
• python convert csv to excel (xlsx)
• python convert csv to dictionary
• python convert csv to parquet
• python convert csv to list
• python convert csv to list of lists
• python convert csv to list of tuples
• python convert csv to txt
• python convert csv to dataframe
• python convert csv to list of dictionaries

https://www.sickgaming.net/blog/2022/07/...in-python/