Convert CSV to JSON in Python

5 Easy Steps to Convert a CSV to a JSON File

You can convert a CSV file to a JSON file by using the following five steps:

1. Import the csv and json libraries
2. Open the CSV as a file object in reading mode using the open(path_to_csv, 'r') function in a context manager (=with environment).
3. Load the CSV content into Python using the csv.DictReader(fobj) and pass the file object just created.
4. Iterate over each row and update a newly-created dictionary my_json using one of the column values as key: my_json[key] = row
5. Store the my_json dictionary data in a JSON file using the json.dumps(my_json) function.

Here’s a code example that converts the CSV file 'my_file.csv' to a JSON file 'my_file.json':

import csv
import json 


csv_file = 'my_file.csv'
json_file = 'my_file.json'

my_json = {}
with open(csv_file, 'r') as fobj:
    reader = csv.DictReader(fobj)
    for row in reader:
        # Use one of the CSV column names as a key
        key = row['Name']
        my_json[key] = row 

with open(json_file,'w') as fobj:
    fobj.write(json.dumps(my_json, indent=2))

Note that you should use one of the CSV columns as a key. In this example, we used the column ‘Name‘ from our CSV file. In your case, you’ll need to use your own column headers.

Input CSV File:

Name,Job,Age,Income
Alice,Programmer,23,110000
Bob,Executive,34,90000
Carl,Sales,45,50000

Output JSON File:

{
  "Alice": {
    "Name": "Alice",
    "Job": "Programmer",
    "Age": "23",
    "Income": "110000"
  },
  "Bob": {
    "Name": "Bob",
    "Job": "Executive",
    "Age": "34",
    "Income": "90000"
  },
  "Carl": {
    "Name": "Carl",
    "Job": "Sales",
    "Age": "45",
    "Income": "50000"
  }
}

You can try it yourself in our interactive Jupyter Notebook here:

Python Convert CSV to JSON with Headers

The csv.DictReader() approach presented before assumes that the first line in the CSV is the header. Thus, the first line is used as a header of the CSV — for example, to access the specific row key of the column 'Name' using row['Name'].

Python Convert CSV to JSON without Headers

The csv.DictReader() approach presented before assumes that the first line in the CSV is the header.

If your CSV file doesn’t have any header information in the first line, you can set them manually using the fieldnames argument of the csv.DictReader() method that takes a sequence of column labels (strings).

Here’s the syntax of the DictReader() method:

 class csv.DictReader(f, fieldnames=None, restkey=None, restval=None, dialect='excel', *args, **kwds)

“The fieldnames parameter is a sequence. If fieldnames is omitted, the values in the first row of file f will be used as the fieldnames.” — Documentation

The following code snippet shows how to convert the same CSV without headers to a JSON file by setting custom column (header) strings as a list ['XXX', 'YYY', 'ZZZ', '---']:

import csv
import json 


csv_file = 'my_file.csv'
json_file = 'my_file.json'

my_json = {}
with open(csv_file, 'r') as fobj:
    reader = csv.DictReader(fobj, fieldnames=['XXX', 'YYY', 'ZZZ', '---'])
    for row in reader:
        key = row['---']
        my_json[key] = row 

with open(json_file,'w') as fobj:
    fobj.write(json.dumps(my_json, indent=2))

Here are the input and output files:

Input CSV File:

Name,Job,Age,Income
Alice,Programmer,23,110000
Bob,Executive,34,90000
Carl,Sales,45,50000

Output JSON File:

{
  "Income": {
    "XXX": "Name",
    "YYY": "Job",
    "ZZZ": "Age",
    "---": "Income"
  },
  "110000": {
    "XXX": "Alice",
    "YYY": "Programmer",
    "ZZZ": "23",
    "---": "110000"
  },
  "90000": {
    "XXX": "Bob",
    "YYY": "Executive",
    "ZZZ": "34",
    "---": "90000"
  },
  "50000": {
    "XXX": "Carl",
    "YYY": "Sales",
    "ZZZ": "45",
    "---": "50000"
  }
}

Or, as a screenshot:

You can see that the first row is now used as a normal CSV entry row and not as a header as in the previous example without specifying the fieldnames argument of the DictReader() method.

Python Convert CSV to JSON Pandas

The pandas.to_json() method converts a DataFrame object to a JSON string.

The syntax for this method is as follows:

# Syntax to_json()
DataFrame.to_json(path_or_buf=None, orient=None, date_format=None, double_precision=10, force_ascii=True, date_unit='ms', default_handler=None, lines=False, compression='infer', index=True, indent=None, storage_options=None)

The following example reads in the countries.csv file to a DataFrame. This DataFrame then converts to JSON:

df = pd.read_csv('countries.csv').head()
result = df.to_json(indent=4, orient='records', lines=True)
print(result)

• Line [1] reads in the first five (5) rows (head) of the countries.csv file. The output saves to a DataFrame (df).
• Line [2] does the following:
  • converts the DataFrame to a JSON format
  • formats the output by indenting each record four (4) spaces from the left
  • sets the orient parameter to records and lines to True (see above definition).
  • saves the output to result.
• Line [3] outputs the result to the terminal.

Output – result

More Python CSV Conversions

🐍 Learn More: I have compiled an “ultimate guide” on the Finxter blog that shows you the best method, respectively, to convert a CSV file to JSON, Excel, dictionary, Parquet, list, list of lists, list of tuples, text file, DataFrame, XML, NumPy array, and list of dictionaries.

Pheww! Let’s end this article on a more funny note! 🙂

Programmer Humor

Q: How do you tell an introverted computer scientist from an extroverted computer scientist?

A: An extroverted computer scientist looks at your shoes when he talks to you.

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