And in most cases the format of the file does not match with the required format of the application you want to use. Therefore you have to convert the file into the right format. There exist many ways to convert data. Within this article, I want to show you how the Windows PowerShell may be used for the conversion of a CSV file into a XML file. This online tool allows you to convert a CSV file into a XML file. To make use of this converter, define a valid XML template using placeholders in the format ##POSITION## to substitute the value of the CSV file within the XML snippet. ##1## is the first value, ##2## the second value and so on. Your template should NOT. How to convert text to xml, convert tab to xml, and convert csv files to xml - Duration: 2:52. HotHotSoftware 24,375 views.

Introduction

Recently, I developed a Windows application that received information via a CSV file. I needed to query the information to extract values and make a series of statistic calculations, and obviously, the CSV format was not the ideal way to do them.

I did a small research on the Internet, but I couldn't find any free code to do the job. So, I decided to make it myself, and surprisingly, I discovered a simple way using LINQ to XML.

In this article, I have exposed the code and a small console program to test it. You can use it as you wish. Enjoy it!

Background

Panasonic 3d blu ray player. The method described here converts a CSV file with an undetermined number of rows and fields to a well formatted XML file.

CSV restriction: the CSV file need to have the first row with the name of the fields, as in the following example:

and the routine converts the file to the following XML document:

That is a flat XML file with all fields converted to a value element with the variable name and the variable value. This schema is repeated for each row.

Using the code

The code is simple. Unlike the baroque constructions that DOM need to implement an XML structure, LINQ makes the process surprisingly simple. We use XDocument, the class that LINQ uses to manage the XML InfoSet.

You can see it in the following code:

To use the class, you only need to call the ConvertCsvToXML method with the appropriate parameters. The class is static, and you don't need to create it. The comments are not well formatted, so correct them in your code.

Here is a small test program that converts our CSV example to XML:

This code stores the result in a outputxml.xml file and shows the resulting XML in the console:

Points of interest

This class show us how much we can simplify our programs using LINQ. If you have worked with DOM, you can compare the models and see how the construction of an XML document is drastically simplified by LINQ.

History

• 19.01.2009 - First version.