JSONify It – CSV to JSON Converter

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For those who have some experience in creating visualizations, particularly online visualizations using JavaScript and libraries such as D3.js, one thing that you will often come across is the need to convert your data. Typically this need will arise because the data you receive or collect will be in a human-friendly format such as an Excel spreadsheet, and in order for you to use it for the visualization you will need that data in JSON format. Annoyingly, this will often be just a one time conversion, meaning writing a stand alone script to do the conversion often seems like overkill.

Handily, there are a number of CSV to JSON converters lying around on the internet for people to use, and most of them work more or less as expected. However, a problem I encountered when building this Procurement Zoomable Treemap visualization, is that you sometimes need the JSON to be nested, and this was not a feature I encountered on any of the online converters.

In order to address my need (and to see if I could pull it off), when I built that visualization I also used Python/Flask/Pandas to build a simple API that generated nested JSON datasets on the fly from an underlying CSV file. Having this allowed me to build the zoomable tree map that could be reconfigured by the user. That is, the user could specify the categories and the order in which the treemap would zoom through.

While this was great, it always felt a little incomplete. Then a few months back, I had some time on my hands and decided to take this API and upgrade it to have a full user interface so that, like many of the online convertors, users could copy and paste data straight into the browser, configure some options, and get a JSON formatted dataset back. The result was JSONify It – a simple but (I hope) easy to use app that is not only very flexible in formatting JSON, but as far as I can tell, is the only CSV to JSON convertor that allows you to nest the JSON by any column (or columns) you specify.

So, for those interested, feel free to take a look, try it out, look at the code, and if you come across any bugs or issues, or would like any further information, please let me know in the comments below.