Exercise: Convert User Records To JSON

Plan

Combine the two rock-stable functions from the previous exercises Exercise: Split Strings To User Dictionaries and Exercise: Write User Records To JSON File into something that we can sell for money. Write a program csv2json.py that converts a user database from CSV format into a more modern JSON format.

Additional complication: Doze user simply click the “Export” button in Excel, having no idea what encoding is. Sure they won’t tell you that the CSV file that you receive is encoded in cp1252.

How

Download a sample database code/users-cp1252.db. Call the program to read that file, and convert it into another file, like so:

$ python csv2json.py users-cp1252.db users.json

Check the output; it should look something like this:

$ cat users.json
[{"id": 666, "firstname": "J\u00f6rg", "lastname": "Faschingbauer", "birth": "1966-06-19"}, {"id": 42, "firstname": "Caro", "lastname": "Faschingbauer", "birth": "1997-04-25"}, {"id": 7, "firstname": "Johanna", "lastname": "Faschingbauer", "birth": "1995-06-11"}, {"id": 1024, "firstname": "Philipp", "lastname": "Lichtenberger", "birth": "1986-04-06"}](jfasch-home)