csv2txt

python script to break csv into multiple txt files (a byproduct of my nlp project)

Inspiration & Description

Well, this all started off with my complaint:

It’s 2020 and those NLP tools still do not support csv! (｡•ˇ‸ˇ•｡)

Imagine that you had scraped a whole bunch of texts into a single csv file, you were happy and you’d never been more ready for corpus analysis. Then you opened AntConc and realized the software could only take txt sources. That discovery ruined your day…

There are a number of csv-txt converters available online. But most of them either:

• throw the entire csv file into one single txt, or
• allow you to break each row into a single txt, which contains all the metadata/extra stuff you’ve entered in the same row, whether you like it or not.

After a few trials of the existing tools I decided to create a converter on my own. Currently the program csv2txt.py has the following functionality:

• find a csv file from your local directory,
• pick a specific column of your choice,
• convert the content of each cell to a single txt, and
• output the txts to a directory of your choice
• (more to come in the next release…)

Demo

before: a messy csv file with texts in column I (shaded below) and metadata in columns A-H

after: each cell converted to a single txt file, which can be processed / analyzed by AntConc!

Some ideas for later versions

• create a user interface
• allow custom txt names based on metadata