From TextGrid To JSON

· 04 Jun 2018

In this post we would concentrate on creating JSON output from TextGrid.

Why are we converting textgrid to JSON?

In Gentle ,aligned text results are shown in JSON format.
When alignment process runs online the output needs to shown via exchanging data between a browser and a server, the data can only be text.
JSON is text, and we can convert any JavaScript object into JSON, and send JSON to the server.
We can also convert any JSON received from the server into JavaScript objects. This way we can work with the data as JavaScript objects, with no complicated parsing and translations.

Some points about JSON(JavaScript Object Notation).

It is a way to store information in an organized, easy-to-access manner. In a nutshell, it gives us a human-readable collection of data that we can access in a really logical manner.
It also have browser compatibility with familiar browser such as Chrome , Internet Explorer ,FireFox ,Edge ,Mozilla.

How do we convert textgrid to JSON?

Before converting textgrid to JSON we need to convert textgrid into CSV. After that we can convert CSV into JSON.

How do we convert textgrid to CSV?

Fork TextGrid To CSV converter
Do the installation process as directed.
Navigate to textgrid folder you downloaded from Github in above step.Now open terminal. Type this command :

     python3 textgrid.py -o textgrid2csv.csv 1.TextGrid

Output csv file will be in output.csv and smaple textgrid file would be 1.TextGrid.
Output will look like this

      start,stop,name,tier
      0.76,2.23,asta,word
      2.9,4.5,augar,word

Converting CSV to JSON

Now that we have converted textgrid to csv we are one step closer to get the JSON file format.
We would use python to convert CSV into JSON.Below code will convert CSV to JSON.
Name the above file parser.py .Open terminal and Type

         python3 parser.py -i textgrid2csv.csv -o output.json

Output will look something like This

    [
       {
            "tier": "word",
           "start": "0.76",
           "stop": "2.23",
           "name": "asta"
        },
       {
           "tier": "word",
           "start": "2.9",
           "stop": "4.5",
           "name": "augar"
        }
    ]

So we converted the given TextGrid file into JSON.