How to convert large xml file into csv using Python

Question

I want to convert a very large XML file into CSV format without hardcoding tagnames.

Can anyone help me out?

Without any additional information about the structure of your XML files there is no reasonable answer to your question. — Johann Hagerer, Feb 10 '16 at 08:23

score 2 · Answer 1 · edited Sep 11 '21 at 05:45

2

Firstly, you need to parse your XML files. This can be done via ElementTree API:

Example code:

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
root = ET.parse('your_data.xml').getroot()
with open("output.csv", "w") as file:
    for child in root:
        print(child.tag, child.attrib)
        # naive example how you could save to csv line wise
        file.write(child.tag+";"+child.attrib)

There are also solutions to parse your XMLs directly as dictionary.

Then csv.DictWriter can be used to save the dictionary as CSV.

edited Sep 11 '21 at 05:45

Glorfindel

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answered Feb 10 '16 at 08:37

Johann Hagerer

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root = ET.parse('your_data.xml').getroot() this fails for very large XML files, as they cannot be loaded into memory – Vladimir Vargas Mar 31 '20 at 18:34

How to convert large xml file into csv using Python

1 Answers1