🔄 Universal Data Structure Converter — Apify Actor

A production-grade Apify actor that converts between HTML, XML, CSV, YAML, and JSON formats. Supports 9+ conversion types with smart auto-detection, nested JSON flattening, HTML table scraping, batch URL processing, and full customization.

🌐 Supported Conversions

#	Conversion	Description
1	HTML → JSON	Parse DOM tree or extract <table> data
2	XML → JSON	Full tree with attributes & namespaces
3	CSV → JSON	With auto type-casting (int/float/bool)
4	YAML → JSON	Single or multi-document streams
5	JSON → XML	Custom root/item tags, XML declaration
6	JSON → CSV	Nested object flattening to dot-columns
7	JSON → YAML	Block or flow style output
8	YAML → XML	Chained (YAML → JSON → XML)
9	CSV → XML	Chained (CSV → JSON → XML)

✨ Key Features

• Auto-Detection — Set conversion to auto and the actor detects whether input is HTML, XML, JSON, YAML, or CSV
• URL Fetching — Provide a list of URLs to fetch and convert in batch
• HTML Table Scraping — Extract <table> elements directly into structured JSON arrays
• Smart Type-Casting — CSV values like "30", "true", "99.5" auto-cast to int, bool, float
• Nested Flattening — {"a": {"b": 1}} becomes CSV column a.b when exporting JSON → CSV
• Proxy Support — Use Apify Proxy for fetching URLs behind firewalls
• Custom Delimiters — Comma, tab, semicolon, pipe for CSV input/output
• Pretty-Print or Minify — Configurable indentation or compact output

📋 Input Schema

Parameter	Type	Default	Description
conversionType	string	auto	Conversion to perform (or auto to detect)
outputFormat	string	json	Target format when using auto-detect
inputData	string	(sample)	Raw data to convert (paste directly)
sourceUrls	array	[]	URLs to fetch and convert in batch
csvDelimiter	string	,	CSV column separator
csvHasHeader	boolean	true	Treat first CSV row as column names
typeCast	boolean	true	Auto-cast CSV strings to native types
flattenNested	boolean	true	Flatten nested JSON for CSV export
flattenSeparator	string	.	Separator for flattened key names
xmlRootTag	string	root	Root element name for XML output
xmlListItemTag	string	item	Tag for array items in XML output
xmlDeclaration	boolean	true	Include XML <?xml?> header
xmlStripNamespaces	boolean	true	Remove namespace prefixes from XML tags
htmlExtractTables	boolean	false	Extract only <table> elements from HTML
htmlParser	string	lxml	BeautifulSoup parser engine
yamlMultiDoc	boolean	false	Parse multi-document YAML streams
indent	integer	2	Spaces for pretty-printing (0-8)
minify	boolean	false	Compact output (overrides indent)
outputAsString	boolean	false	Store result as raw string instead of parsed JSON
proxyConfiguration	object	disabled	Proxy settings for URL fetching

🚀 Usage Examples

Example 1: Convert CSV → JSON (default)

Just run the actor with defaults — it ships with sample CSV data and auto-detects the conversion:

{
    "conversionType": "auto",
    "outputFormat": "json"
}

Example 2: HTML Table Scraping

{
    "conversionType": "html2json",
    "inputData": "<table><tr><th>Name</th><th>Age</th></tr><tr><td>Alice</td><td>30</td></tr></table>",
    "htmlExtractTables": true
}

Example 3: Batch URL Processing

{
    "conversionType": "auto",
    "outputFormat": "json",
    "sourceUrls": [
        { "url": "https://example.com/data.csv" },
        { "url": "https://api.example.com/config.yaml" }
    ]
}

Example 4: JSON → CSV with Flattening

{
    "conversionType": "json2csv",
    "inputData": "[{\"id\":1,\"name\":\"Alice\",\"address\":{\"city\":\"NYC\",\"zip\":\"10001\"}}]",
    "flattenNested": true,
    "flattenSeparator": "."
}

Example 5: XML → JSON (Strip Namespaces)

{
    "conversionType": "xml2json",
    "inputData": "<?xml version='1.0'?><catalog><book id='1'><title>Hello</title></book></catalog>",
    "xmlStripNamespaces": true
}

📤 Output Format

Each converted item is stored in the dataset with this structure:

{
    "source": "inline_input",
    "conversion": "csv2json",
    "inputFormat": "csv",
    "outputFormat": "json",
    "timestamp": "2026-04-01T17:30:00.000Z",
    "status": "success",
    "error": null,
    "data": [ ... ]
}

• data — Parsed result (for JSON outputs)
• rawOutput — Raw string result (for XML/CSV/YAML outputs, or when outputAsString is true)
• status — "success" or "failed"
• error — Error message if conversion failed

Run statistics are stored in the Key-Value Store under the key RUN_STATS.

🛠 Local Development

# Clone and install
cd apify-data-converter
pip install -r requirements.txt

# Run locally with Apify CLI
apify run --input-file=input.json

📦 Dependencies

• apify — Apify SDK for Python
• httpx — Async HTTP client for URL fetching
• pyyaml — YAML parsing and serialization
• beautifulsoup4 + lxml — HTML parsing
• html5lib — Lenient HTML parser for broken markup