Export Tor descriptors with Csv, Xml, Json: tor2csv, Tor2xml, tor2json

This ticket to add to Stem a functionality to Stem (as set of small sample applications) that export the tor descriptors in various useful formats:

• csv
• xml
• json

A similar attempt for csv has been done on https://github.com/mrlanrat/TorExport

A post to tor-dev mlist about it is at https://lists.torproject.org/pipermail/tor-dev/2012-June/003633.html

A chat discussion is at:

naif atagar: for example the TorExport tried to do that goal (by torservers) https://github.com/mrlanrat/TorExport but it's not working properly atagar naif: Hm, so you're thinking that the use case is 'write a python app to parse and do something with the descriptors (say, filter), then export the results to a csv'? I could see use in that, though how should we handle new descriptor additions? Add another positional field that might not be expected by callers? 4:16 rransom atagar: SQL! After all, it works soooo nicely for every Tor Python program that uses it. 4:17 naif atagar: you made the right definition of what i mean atagar: a set of python app that use stem to do conversion to csv, json, xml for content of tor descriptors naif atagar: i mean, i am a sysadmin, not a coder, so for me having something that i can easily sed/awk and/or load with simple CSV library it's extremely useful atagar naif: Sounds good. I'd be happy to add a 'get_csv()' method to decriptor classes and have a little converter like TorExport. However, I'm still not sure what you would like to have happen when there are descriptor additions. 4:20 atagar Add the new fields to the end of the csv or something else? 4:20

naif atagar: it make sense atagar: tipically within CSV files the 1st line it's used to describe various fields atagar: we may have as a convention that the 1st line always bring the description of the descriptor addition fields? 4:21 4:21 atagar naif: Ahh, ok. Please file a ticket, it would be an easy task for one of the new people to pick up. If there's a specific pressing need for it then I could easily hack it out.