Talk:Import CSV data into a wiki

From Organic Design wiki
Revision as of 21:57, 26 March 2008 by Phalseid (talk | contribs) (issues)

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 can 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

Source File

Template

Logging In

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

Job file syntax

The job files contain the following parameters to specify a parsing job:

  • csv: c:\foo.csv (the full pathname of the CSV file for this job)
  • wiki: http://www.mywiki.com/wiki/index.php (the URL of the wiki to update, must be long-form)
  • user: WikiUser (the username to log in to the wiki as)
  • pass:
  • title: 7 (index of field to use as article title, zero is first field)
  • template: MyTemplate (defaults to "Record" if not included)

issues

  • delimiter: can we use/specify one different than the ","? many of the files contain text with comma included.
  • Unicode: for the Japanese import, the unicode characters seem to break the import. We need to be able to have unicode article names, so advisment here would be prudent.
  • what is the delay time for logging in? (troubleshooting a slow server)


Notes

  • save excel spreadsheet as Unicode Text
  • open unicode text in notepad
  • search and replace TAB character with ","
  • save