Converting JSON to CSV

For this chapter, we will be using the Yelp data available from the challenge at https://www.yelp.com/dataset/challenge. This section uses the dataset from round 9 of the challenge. For background, Yelp is a site for rating different products and services where Yelp publishes the ratings to users.

The dataset file is a very large (a few gigabytes) amount of ratings. There are several sets of rating information in the download-for business ratings, reviews, tips (as in this would be a nice place to visit), and a user set. We are interested in the review data.

When dealing with such large files it may be useful to find and use a large file editor so you can poke into the data file. On Windows, most of the standard editors are limited to a few megabytes. I used the Large Text File Viewer program to open these JSON files.

All of the files are in JSON format. JSON is a human readable format with structured elements—for example, a city object containing street objects. While...