How can I transform rows into repeated column based data?

Question

I'm trying to take a dataset that looks like this:

Source format of data

And transform the records into this format:

Destination Format

The resulting format would have two columns, one for the old column names and one column for the values. If there are 10,000 rows then there should be 10,000 groups of data in the new format.

I'm open to all different methods, excel formulas, sql (mysql), or straight ruby code would work for me also. What is the best way to tackle this problem?

Display format is generally an application-level concern and should be handled by your application code (ruby). — mellamokb, Jul 26 '12 at 17:50
What is the point of getting this data into a new format? Is it only for human readability or is it to import this into another system? — barancw, Jul 26 '12 at 17:51
Take a look at this Railscast http://railscasts.com/episodes/362-exporting-csv-and-excel You're not using Rails, but it will still help. — LanguagesNamedAfterCofee, Jul 26 '12 at 18:05
The point is to import it into another system. It is a hard requirement, they have built a lot of code around this format. — OpenCoderX, Jul 26 '12 at 18:07

score 10 · Answer 1 · answered Jul 26 '12 at 19:11

You could add an ID column to the left of your data and use a Reverse PivotTable method.

Press Alt+D+P to access the Pivottable Wizard with the steps:

1.  Multiple Consolidation Ranges
2a. I will create the page fields
2b. Range: eg. sheet1!A1:A4 
    How Many Page Fields: 0
3.  Existing Worksheet: H1

In the PivotTable:

Uncheck Row and Column from the Field List
Double-Click the Grand Total as shown

enter image description here

Björn Nilsson · Accepted Answer · 2012-07-26T20:50:56.273

Just for fun:

# Input file format is tab separated values

# name  search_term address code
# Jim jim jim_address 123
# Bob bob bob_address 124
# Lisa  lisa  lisa_address  126
# Mona  mona  mona_address  129


infile = File.open("inputfile.tsv")

headers = infile.readline.strip.split("\t")
puts headers.inspect
of = File.new("outputfile.tsv","w")
infile.each_line do |line|
  row = line.split("\t")
  headers.each_with_index do |key, index|
    of.puts "#{key}\t#{row[index]}"
  end
end

of.close



# A nicer way, on my machine it does 1.6M rows in about 17 sec

File.open("inputfile.tsv") do | in_file |
  headers = in_file.readline.strip.split("\t")
  File.open("outputfile.tsv","w") do | out_file |
    in_file.each_line do | line |
      row = line.split("\t")
      headers.each_with_index do | key, index | 
        out_file << key << "\t" << row[index]
      end
    end 
  end
end

OpenCoderX · Answer 3 · 2013-04-26T01:12:46.827

destination = File.open(dir, 'a') do |d|   #choose the destination file and open it

    source = File.open(dir , 'r+') do |s|  #choose the source file and open it
      headers = s.readline.strip.split("\t")  #grab the first row of the source file to use as headers
      s.each do |line| #interate over each line from the source

        currentLine = line.strip.split("\t") #create an array from the current line
           count = 0   #track the count of each array index
        currentLine.each do |c| #iterate over each cell of the currentline
              finalNewLine = '"' + "#{headers[count]}" + '"' + "\t" + '"' + "#{currentLine[count]}" + '"' + "\n" #build each new line as one big string
          d.write(finalNewLine) #write final line to the destination file.
          count += 1 #increment the count to work on the next cell in the line
        end

      end
  end

end

How can I transform rows into repeated column based data?

3 Answers3

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