Google data visualization with CSV data

Question

I have a url that returns CSV data. I would like to use Google Vizualization to create an interactive data chart. I looked at a few examples on the Google Chart and Vizualization webpage, but it bothers me a bit as I am not familiar with JavaScript or web programming in general.

Question: Should I use JavaScript to analyze the CSV string myself and manually build the DataTable using addColumn () and addRows ()? Or is there a way to simply pass the CSV URL to the charting function? I hope to do something like this:

var csv_data = get_data_from_url('http://...') var data = new google.visualization.DataTable(csv_data); var chart = new google.visualization.PieChart(document.getElementById('chart_div')); chart.draw(data, ...); 

Can anyone help me out?

Thanks.

Answer 1

Yes, they seem to be using JSON or some close variant of JSON for the data. You can try the CSV to JSON converter. Converting CSV to JSON seems to be a pretty trivial operation requiring only a few lines of code:

Convert CSV / XLS to JSON?