Question

Is there a way to take a spreadsheet and turn it into xml file below?

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<ArrayOfBusiness xmlns:xsi="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema-instance" xmlns:xsd="http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema">
  <Business>
    <Name>Company Name 1</Name>
    <AddressList>
      <Address>
        <AddressLine>123 Main St.</AddressLine>
      </Address>
    </AddressList>
  </Business>
  <Business>
    <Name>Company Name 2</Name>
    <AddressList>
      <Address>
        <AddressLine>1 Elm St.</AddressLine>
      </Address>
      <Address>
        <AddressLine>2 Elm St.</AddressLine>
      </Address>
    </AddressList>
  </Business>
</ArrayOfBusiness>

Answer 1

I put this in LinqPad and it did what you needed. If you’ve never used LinqPad… well now’s a great time to start.

 var csvs = new List<string>();  

csvs.Add( "Company Name 1,123 Main St."); 
 csvs.Add("Company Name 2,1 Elm St.,2 Elm St."); 

 var xml = 
 (from c in csvs 
 let split = c.Split(',')
 select  // split
 new XElement("ArrayOfBusiness", 
    new XElement("Business", 
        new XElement("Name", split[0] ), 
        new XElement("AddressList", 
          new XElement("Address"
            ,
            (from s in split.Skip(1) // skip the first split 
            select 
            new XElement("AddressLine", s)) 
        )
 )))); // <-- is it LISP? 

 xml.Dump();

Results:

<ArrayOfBusiness>
  <Business>
    <Name>Company Name 1</Name>
    <AddressList>
      <Address>
        <AddressLine>123 Main St.</AddressLine>
      </Address>
    </AddressList>
  </Business>
  <Business>
    <Name>Company Name 2</Name>
    <AddressList>
      <Address>
        <AddressLine>1 Elm St.</AddressLine>
        <AddressLine>2 Elm St.</AddressLine>
      </Address>
    </AddressList>
  </Business>
</ArrayOfBusiness> 

It isn’t exactly what you wanted, but looks functionally equivalent to me. Might need a bit of tweaking in the LINQ.

Write to file with: File.WriteAllText(@"c:\temp\addresses.xml", xml.ToString());