Standards and Best practice: Exporting Tree Structure Data to CSV

Question

I have a tree structural data(parent child) to export into CSV.

Is there any standard format to display the data in a meaningful way and maybe for future usage?

Currently I am considering using empty "", to denote the next level.

Answer 1

Well, there is no standard here, at least not something I'm aware of. It usually comes to performance aspects, the ease of usage and the size of tree.

I can offer you to store the tree as a pairs of parent son relation, and then you'll be able to recreate the tree.

Example:

Lets assume, you have a tree:

root

a

b

  c

This can be expressed like series of relations:

root --> a

root --> b

b --> c

This is exactly what you can store in the file:

root,a
root,b
b,c

Another interesting method can be used given the fact that the tree (at least binary tree) can be represented as an array

This will let you store the single line in your csv file since the array is linear and it naturally maps into an array I'm sure you can find much more ways to store the tree, the sky is a limit here, I've just pointed you a few.

Hope this helps