[java] Converting JSON to XLS/CSV in Java

Does anyone have any sample Java code to convert a JSON document to XLS/CSV file? I have tried to search on Google but to no avail.

A JSON document basically consists of lists and dictionaries. There is no obvious way to map such a datastructure on a two-dimensional table.

you can use commons csv to convert into CSV format. or use POI to convert into xls. if you need helper to convert into xls, you can use jxls, it can convert java bean (or list) into excel with expression language.

Basically, the json doc maybe is a json array, right? so it will be same. the result will be list, and you just write the property that you want to display in excel format that will be read by jxls. See http://jxls.sourceforge.net/reference/collections.html

If the problem is the json can't be read in the jxls excel property, just serialize it into collection of java bean first.

You could only convert a JSON array into a CSV file.

Lets say, you have a JSON like the following :

{"infile": [{"field1": 11,"field2": 12,"field3": 13},
            {"field1": 21,"field2": 22,"field3": 23},
            {"field1": 31,"field2": 32,"field3": 33}]}

Lets see the code for converting it to csv :

import java.io.File;
import java.io.IOException;

import org.apache.commons.io.FileUtils;
import org.json.CDL;
import org.json.JSONArray;
import org.json.JSONException;
import org.json.JSONObject;

public class JSON2CSV {
    public static void main(String myHelpers[]){
        String jsonString = "{\"infile\": [{\"field1\": 11,\"field2\": 12,\"field3\": 13},{\"field1\": 21,\"field2\": 22,\"field3\": 23},{\"field1\": 31,\"field2\": 32,\"field3\": 33}]}";

        JSONObject output;
        try {
            output = new JSONObject(jsonString);


            JSONArray docs = output.getJSONArray("infile");

            File file=new File("/tmp2/fromJSON.csv");
            String csv = CDL.toString(docs);
            FileUtils.writeStringToFile(file, csv);
        } catch (JSONException e) {
            e.printStackTrace();
        } catch (IOException e) {
            // TODO Auto-generated catch block
            e.printStackTrace();
        }        
    }

}

Now you got the CSV generated from JSON.

It should look like this:

field1,field2,field3
11,22,33
21,22,23
31,32,33

The maven dependency was like,

<dependency>
    <groupId>org.json</groupId>
    <artifactId>json</artifactId>
    <version>20090211</version>
</dependency>

Update Dec 13, 2019:

Updating the answer, since now we can support complex JSON Arrays as well.

import java.nio.file.Files;
import java.nio.file.Paths;

import com.github.opendevl.JFlat;

public class FlattenJson {

    public static void main(String[] args) throws Exception {
        String str = new String(Files.readAllBytes(Paths.get("path_to_imput.json")));

        JFlat flatMe = new JFlat(str);

        //get the 2D representation of JSON document
        flatMe.json2Sheet().headerSeparator("_").getJsonAsSheet();

        //write the 2D representation in csv format
        flatMe.write2csv("path_to_output.csv");
    }

}

dependency and docs details are in link