stackexchange-xml-converter

CLI tool that allows you to convert Stack Exchange data dumps from XML to CSV format, which is more suitable for importing to the different databases.

Table of contents

• Getting started
  • Download database dump
  • Extract
  • Building of stackexchange-xml-converter
  • XML to CSV converting
• RDBMS schema examples
• License

Getting started

Before, ensure that you have:

• Working Go environment with go version >= 1.14. Execute in the console go version command. It should display the current version of the compiler.
• Archiver that can extract .7z files. Possible candidate is 7z.

Download database dump

Choose and download the database dump that you are going to convert.

Important: Stackoverflow dump stored in 8 separated 7z archives:

• stackoverflow.com-Badges.7z ( ~ 70M compressed / 4G uncompressed / 37M rows )
• stackoverflow.com-Comments.7z ( ~ 4.5G compressed / 22G uncompressed / 76M rows )
• stackoverflow.com-PostHistory.7z ( ~ 28.0G compressed / 138G uncompressed / 133M rows)
• stackoverflow.com-PostLinks.7z ( ~ 100M compressed / 800M uncompressed / 7M rows)
• stackoverflow.com-Posts.7z ( ~ 16G compressed / 80G uncompressed / 50M rows)
• stackoverflow.com-Tags.7z ( ~ 900K compressed / 5.0M uncompressed / 60K rows)
• stackoverflow.com-Users.7z ( ~ 650M compressed / 4.0G uncompressed / 13M rows)
• stackoverflow.com-Votes.7z ( ~ 1.0G compressed / 20G uncompressed / 200M rows)

Extract

Extract archive(s) content file(s) to the directory from where you will convert XML files.

Example with academia.stackexchange.com.7z dump:

$ mkdir xml csv
$ 7z e academia.stackexchange.com.7z -oxml
$ ls xml/
Badges.xml  Comments.xml  PostHistory.xml  PostLinks.xml  Posts.xml  Tags.xml  Users.xml  Votes.xml

Building of

stackexchange-xml-converter

Clone & build stackexchange-xml-converter converter:

$ git clone https://github.com/SkobelevIgor/stackexchange-xml-converter
$ cd stackexchange-xml-converter/
$ go build

XML to CSV converting

Now you have stackexchange-xml-converter executable file. Let’s convert XML files:

./stackexchange-xml-converter -—source-path=../xml --store-to-dir=../csv

List of possible flags:

• source-path (Required) Absolute or relative path to the directory with an XML file(s) or to the separate XML file.
• store-to-dir (Optional) Absolute or relative path to the directory where to store result CSV files.
• skip-html-decoding (Optional) Some of the files (e.g., Posts.xml) contain escaped HTML. By default, the converter will decode them. To disable this behavior, use this flag.

RDBMS schema examples

Here you can find examples of the schema for the different databases:

• PostgreSQL

License

MIT License