how to encode this data to parent / children structure in JSON

Question

I am working with d3.js to visualise families of animals (organisms) (up to 4000 at a time) as a tree graph, though the data source could just as well be a directory listing, or

Answer 1

The following is specific to the structure you've provided, it could be made more generic fairly easily. I'm sure the addChild function can be simplified. Hopefully the comments are helpful.

function toHeirarchy(obj) {

  // Get the organisms array
  var orgName, orgNames = obj.organisms;

  // Make root object
  var root = {name:'ROOT', children:[]};

  // For each organism, get the name parts
  for (var i=0, iLen=orgNames.length; i