Import CSV data into a wiki

Import CSV data into a wiki Organic Design procedure

csv2wiki.pl is a simple perl script to import data from a CSV file into a MediaWiki.

Installation

The script depends on a Perl module called MediaWiki.pm which needs to be saved in the same location, or in one of your Perl include paths.

It also depends on LWP, XML::Simple and Text::CSV. If these dependencies are not present, Perl will raise an error specifying which one is not available and you can then install it with CPAN, e.g.

cpan Text::CSV

On Debian-like systems there are also packages for the three dependencies:

apt install libwww-perl libxml-simple-perl libtext-csv-perl

Usage

The program is run from the shell and requires one parameter which is the filename of a configuration file describing the parameters for the job.

./csv2wiki.pl /home/myJob.conf

Here is an example the content of a configuration file:

wiki     = "http://foo.bar/wiki/index.php"
user     = "Foo"
pass     = "Bar"
csv      = "/home/foo/projects/bar.csv"
title    = "$1 $2 $3"
template = "Customer"

Each line of the input CSV file will be imported into an article in the wiki, and the first line of the input file specifies the column header names, for example:

Title, Firstname, Surname
Mr, Bob, McFoo
Miss, Mary, Barson

In this example the first row of data will be imported into an article called "Mr Bob McFoo" with the following content. The column header names are used as the template parameter names, with the values from that row of the CSV file being used as the values for the template parameters.

{{Customer
 | Title = Mr
 | Firstname = Bob
 | Surname = McFoo
}}

If the page already existed, then the new template would be inserted at the top of the page (or the bottom if "append" is set). Or if the template already exists in the page, then it's values will be updated.

Note that pages that already have templates on them must only use a single value on each line in their syntax.

Configuration options

Here is a description of the possible parameters in the job file and their meaning:

Name	Meaning	Default value
csv	The source file to import relative to the location of the script	-
wiki	the full long-form URL of the wiki including index.php	-
user	Username of a user on the wiki with permission to create the necessary articles	-
pass	The users password	-
separator	Also just "sep" is allowed, specifies the separator character used in the CSV file	comma
title	The format of the title using $n to specify the column numbers, default is $1 which means to use just the first column as the page title	$1
template	The template that the parameters should be wrapped by in the created wiki articles	Record
append	Set this to 1 to place the template at the end of the text if the template doesn't already exist in the article	0
include	A comma-separated list of the columns that should be included from the CSV, by default all columns are used	not set