XML to TSV Converter

Converting XML to TSV (Tab-Separated Values) follows a similar process to converting XML to CSV, but instead of commas, you use tabs as the delimiter between values. TSV is often used when you need a simple, human-readable, and tabular format, but without the potential complications of commas within the data, which might be problematic for CSV.

Why Convert XML to TSV?
Simplicity: TSV is easier to read than CSV when data contains commas, since it avoids the need for escaping or enclosing values in quotes.
Compactness: Similar to CSV, but with the added benefit of using tabs which is often easier to read in certain cases (like large datasets).
Compatibility: Some systems prefer or are better suited to TSV files over CSV (though CSV is more common).
How to Convert XML to TSV:
The process is similar to XML to CSV conversion but uses tabs as delimiters.

Extract the relevant data: Identify which XML tags represent the data you want to extract and convert to a tabular form.
Flatten the structure: As with CSV, you'll flatten any nested elements into columns.
Write to TSV: Once flattened, write the data to a TSV file, with each value separated by a tab (\t) character.
Example Conversion:
Let's use the same XML as before, but convert it to TSV format:

XML:

xml

<customers>
<customer>
<id>1</id>
<name>John Doe</name>
<email>johndoe@example.com</email>
<address>
<street>Main St.</street>
<city>New York</city>
</address>
</customer>
<customer>
<id>2</id>
<name>Jane Smith</name>
<email>janesmith@example.com</email>
<address>
<street>High St.</street>
<city>Los Angeles</city>
</address>
</customer>
</customers>
TSV (flattening the nested address tag):

tsv

id name email street city
1 John Doe johndoe@example.com Main St. New York
2 Jane Smith janesmith@example.com High St. Los Angeles
Steps:
Identify Elements: id, name, email, address are the key fields you want in the TSV.
Flatten Nested Elements: Flatten address into separate columns for street and city.
Write Output: Write the headers (id, name, email, street, city), then populate the rows with the corresponding data.
Tools and Libraries for Conversion:
If you are working programmatically, you can use tools and libraries to automate the conversion:

Python:

You can use xml.etree.ElementTree or lxml for parsing the XML.

Use the csv module to output data, but specify the tab delimiter (\t) instead of the default comma.

Example using xml.etree.ElementTree to parse the XML and write to TSV:

python

import xml.etree.ElementTree as ET
import csv

# Parse the XML file
tree = ET.parse('customers.xml')
root = tree.getroot()

# Open a TSV file to write to
with open('output.tsv', 'w', newline='') as tsvfile:
tsv_writer = csv.writer(tsvfile, delimiter='\t')

# Write the header
tsv_writer.writerow(['id', 'name', 'email', 'street', 'city'])

# Iterate over the XML data and write each record to the TSV file
for customer in root.findall('customer'):
id = customer.find('id').text
name = customer.find('name').text
email = customer.find('email').text
street = customer.find('address/street').text
city = customer.find('address/city').text
tsv_writer.writerow([id, name, email, street, city])
Command-line tools:

Some XML-to-CSV tools can be modified to output TSV by changing the delimiter. Alternatively, you could process CSV to TSV using standard tools (sed, awk, or Python).
Online Tools:

There are some online XML to TSV converters, but they usually support basic, non-nested XML. For more complex XML, you might need a custom script.