How to transform valid JSON to CSV?

I'm trying to extract information from a JSON file and write some of the contents to a CSV file.

Here is an example of my text

"data":{"headers":{"sender":"[email protected]"
"to":"[email protected]"
"subject":"Help with this project"
"x-received-time":"14144273245408"
"received":"from abc.com ()\r\n        by mail.mail.com with SMTP (Postfix)\r\n        for [email protected];\r\n        Mon
"from":"\"Help with this project\" <[email protected]>"
"date":"Mon, 27 Oct 2014 09:03:14 -0500"
"id":"1414427328-2345855-frank"
"to":"[email protected]"
"time":14144273245408
"subject":"Help with this project"
"fromfull":"[email protected]"

I want to grab the contents from: to, fromfull, id, subject, date and write it to a csv file where To is column A, fromfull is column B, and so forth.

Can anyone offer any assistance? This is a JSON response.

You can convert this JSON to CSV in a single line with jq.

jq '.data.headers | [.sender, .to, .subject, ."x-received-time", 
.received, .from, .date, .id, .to, .subject, .fromfull] 
+ [(.time | tostring)] | join(", ")'

Breakdown:

• .data.headers - Emit headers as an object
  • If data contained an array of headers it would be .data[].headers
• […string keys list…] - Emit string values as an array
• + [(.time | tostring)] - Emit time as a string and add to the array
• join(", ") - Join the array values using a comma and a space
  • Substitute your favorite delimiter here

You can use the following perl command to create the CSV output, open a terminal and type:

perl -n0e '@a= $_ =~ /"date":(".*?").*?"id":(".*?").*?"to":"(.*?)".*?".*?"subject":(".*?").*?"fromfull":"(.*?)"/gs;  while (my @next_n = splice @a, 0, 5) { print join(q{,}, @next_n)."\n"}' inputfile.txt

It will work even if you have multiple headers in your input file.

Note that only the last "to": field is taken into account (it seems that your headers provide the info twice)

The command output:

"Mon, 27 Oct 2014 09:03:14 -0500","1414427328-2345855-frank",[email protected],"Help with this project",[email protected]