In this particular example it would produce a simple tree of three files: This process is common in the database world and called normalization. A loosely defined branch could be any close combination of values and attributes that are all linked together with strict 1:1 relationship.

The answer is quite simple – rather than trying to squeeze everything in a single file, normalize and split it, one file per independent “ branch ”. But what now? Surely there must be a better way to dump this all to a basic format like CSV”

Notice that the company’s attributes are repeated, which also creates redundant entries. Extracting them together would result in a cartesian product: company They are independent XPaths and represent one-to-many child relationships. It’s a catchy promise but unless you’re working with flat data structures, like for instance the output from Oracle’s dbms_XMLgen.getXML function you can pretty much forget about it. It is exactly those complex scenarios that all the “XML2CSV” converters out there can’t handle. However, that leaves those remaining 99.5% cases where XML is utilized because we need to represent some complex structure that CSV can’t handle. XML can indeed accommodate flat, tabular data structures. Well, you might think “ This is just another structured text file, like CSV so it should be straightforward…At the end of the day the difference is you have the values inside their own tag delimiters rather than just commas ”, right?

Note: If you have a good grasp on XML specifics you may skip the next few paragraphs. Have you ever tried to process data in XML?ĭid you have to load its values into a relational database or simply convert it to plain CSV?īefore I show you a simple way of processing complex XMLs, let’s first think out loud what XML actually is used for.

Xml convert to csv