How to convert Json to CSV or Excel?

How do I use Python to convert json to .csv?

• I have data from Twitter's streaming API.  It comes down as JSON, and I need to get it into a .csv for analysis.  Python seems to be the way to go.  So far, the internet is assuming a level of Python knowledge I do not have. I've found plenty of online tutorials, but none of them make sense.  (See: http://mike.teczno.com/notes/streaming-data-from-twitter.html.  See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/5293534/download-json-data-and-convert-it-to-csv-using-python?rq=1 See: http://stackoverflow.com/questions/3976345/convert-json-to-csv?rq=1) My only programming experience is with R, though I am very comfortable with R. So, where do I start?  I've gathered I'll need to import the json and csv libraries into Python.  Does my script define the fields to pull from the JSON into the .csv? Why I can't I just tell Python to put all the fields into the .csv file? I don't want to become a Python expert; I just want a scaleable script (will have daily Twitter data once my project is running).  Thanks! Zack

• Answer:

  What are you trying to do with these tweets, precisely? Take a look at http://docs.python.org/2/library/json.html jsonTweet = json.loads(jsonline) will transform some json into a dict, and each field in the tweet will be a a key or will be nested beneath one of the other keys. createdAt = jsonTweet["created_at"] now you have a createdAt date string Retweet data is harder to extract; you'll need a try/catch to test whether a tweet was retweeted, then retrieve the original tweet data which is in the same format as your jsonedTweet, but nested in a field called "retweet" or something similar. You can get a grip on all the fields using something like print json.dumps({'4': 5, '6': 7}, sort_keys=True, indent=4,separators=(',', ': ')) What specific data do you want from the tweet? Writing to csv is easy just make a list of the fields you want in the form