Working with ROOT files can be a pain, as they are not portable or usable outside the ROOT/C++ ecosystem with the exception of the phenomenal uproot. This script, root_convert.py takes a .root file and extracts the objects inside of it then converts that data into other formats.

This script takes the .root files, converts the internal objects into .parquet and .json files; then converts the .parquet files into any specified format from duckdb, excel, hdf5, sqlite, json, or keeps it as parquet files. The conversions specifically are:

• Trees -> parquet
• Histograms -> json
• Dynamic Objects -> json

JSON is used due to the flexibility of the format, while parquet is a fast, compressed, and portable format. All other types of objects are not implemented and PRs are welcome.

• pipenv run python root_convert.py <format> <input file>
• The output is in the current directory

Due to the non-uniform data inside histograms, json was choosen; to reconstruct a histogram in a particular plotting library from the extracted data will take some work, but all of the relevant data is inside of the outtputed file.