Talk:Import CSV data into a wiki

Description

csv2wiki is a way to import data from a CSV file into a wiki running mediawiki. There are two versions of this program. The first is a command-line driven version written in the Perl language. The second is a PHP version that runs as a MediaWiki command-line maintenance script so that it can integrate directly with the wiki database instead of working via HTTP requests.

How It Works

The script uses wiki.pl to login and edit wiki articles

Job File

The job file contains all the information necessary to update your wiki from content in the Source File. Fields in the job file include:

• csv: Source File #full path and file name
• wiki: http://mydomain.com/wiki/index.php5 #wiki URL (must be long form including the index.php
• user: username #an active user on the wiki
• pass: password #user's password
• separator # delimiter between records (default is comma, this is a regular expression, so you can use it to remove white-space, eg \s*,\s* or specify tabs with \t)
• title: n # the column number that gives the article it's title
• template: # defaults to Template:Record if there is none

Source File

• Unicode: Ensure that the CSV file is encoded in UTF-8 if it contains special characters

Template

A really cool thing to do would be have a template that the article parses and fishes out the {{{params}}} from a required template, and operates on those columns accordingly, then it can take the template as input and generate the calls always like this:

From template:Foo;

{{Foo|1= |2= |fodda=|fi=123}}

Approach

1. It needs a template as input, it then uses wiki.pl to fetch the article wikitext
2. It parses through the template and grabs all {{{params}}}

--Sven 13:38, 28 May 2008 (NZST)

Windows

If you are needing to run Csv2wiki from a Windows machine, you will first need to install Active Perl. Refer to their site for documentation.

Install and Run

• Copy your job description file (eg job.txt) to the same directory as the csv2wiki.pl and wiki.pl scripts
• Open up a command prompt
• change to the directory containing the csv2wiki.pl script

perl csv2wiki.pl job.txt

• you can run multiple jobs at the same time by opening multiple cmd windows in windows. Make sure the jobs are different!

Issues

• what is the delay time for logging in? (troubleshooting a slow server)

Login should take about a second

Tips

• Open in excel
• copy spreadsheet and paste special as values only (gets rid of formulas) and resave
• remove or replace all "," characters in file
• save excel spreadsheet as Unicode Text
  • Save As, Save as Type, Unicode Text (*.txt)

• Open and Edit text in Geany (better than notepad),
• search and replace TAB character with "," (cut and paste a tab character from notepad to get this)

NOTE, if you want to use tabs, set separator to \t

• set unicode type (Document, Set encoding, Unicode, UTF-8)
• save