mongodb - Redirect output of mongo query to a csv file

Question

I am using MongoDB 2.2.2 for 32-bit Windows7 machine. I have a complex aggregation query in a .js file. I need to execute this file on the shell and direct the output to a CSV file. I ensure that the query returns a "flat" json (no nested keys), so it is inherently convertible to a neat csv.

I know about load() and eval(). eval() requires me to paste the whole query into the shell and allows only printjson() inside the script, while I need csv. And, the second way: load()..It prints the output on the screen, and again in json format.

Is there a way Mongo can do this conversion from json to csv? (I need csv file to prepare charts on the data). I am thinking:

1. Either mongo has a built-in command for this that I can't find right now.
2. Mongo can't do it for me; I can at most send the json output to a file which I then need to convert to csv myself.
3. Mongo can send the json output to a temporary collection, the contents of which can be easily mongoexported to csv format. But I think only map-reduce queries support output collections. Is that right? I need it for an aggregation query.

Thanks for any help :)

Answer 1

I know this question is old but I spend an hour trying to export a complex query to csv and I wanted to share my thoughts. First I couldn't get any of the json to csv converters to work (although this one looked promising). What I ended up doing was manually writing the csv file in my mongo script.

This is a simple version but essentially what I did:

print("name,id,email");
db.User.find().forEach(function(user){
  print(user.name+","+user._id.valueOf()+","+user.email);
});

This I just piped the query to stdout

mongo test export.js > out.csv

where test is the name of the database I use.