Converting XLS to JSON in C#

As a developer, I recently faced a challenge of converting an Excel file (.xls) into a JSON format. In this article, we will explore how to achieve this using C#.

Firstly, we need to load the Excel file into our application. We can do this by using IronXL, a popular library for working with Excel files in .NET. Once loaded, we can use IronXL's API to iterate through each row and column of the workbook.

Here is an example of how we can do this:

```csharp

WorkBook workbook = WorkBook.Load(fileDownload);

```

Next, we need to create a JSON object that represents our Excel data. We can achieve this by using C#'s built-in `JsonConvert` class from the Newtonsoft.Json library. This class provides various methods for converting .NET objects into their JSON equivalents.

In order to generate a JSON object that represents our Excel data, we will need to iterate through each row and column of the workbook and extract the necessary data. We can do this using two nested loops:

```csharp

var json = new JObject();

for (int i = 1; i <= workbook.Sheets'0'.UsedRange.Rows.Count; i++)

{

var row = new JArray();

for (int j = 1; j <= workbook.Sheets'0'.UsedRange.Columns.Count; j++)

{

if (workbook.Sheets'0'.Cells'i, j'.Value != null)

{

row.Add(workbook.Sheets'0'.Cells'i, j'.Value.ToString());

}

json''locations''.Add(row);

}

```

In this example, we are creating a JSON object with a single property called 'locations'. Each value in the 'locations' array represents a row in our Excel file. Within each row, we are iterating through each column and adding its value as a string to the array.

Finally, we can use `JsonConvert.SerializeObject` to convert our JSON object into a string that we can write to a file or send over the network:

```csharp

string jsonStr = JsonConvert.SerializeObject(json);

```

In conclusion, converting an Excel file (.xls) into a JSON format in C# involves loading the Excel file using IronXL, iterating through each row and column of the workbook, and generating a JSON object that represents our Excel data. We can achieve this by using two nested loops to extract the necessary data from the workbook and create a JSON array with the desired structure.

I hope you find this article helpful in your own endeavors to convert XLS to JSON in C#.

Xls to json