frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Show HN: Convert Large CSV/XLSX to JSON or XML in Browser

https://csvforge.com
41•Botlabs•10mo ago
Hello HN, I'm excited to share a project I've been working on: A simple, fast way to process huge CSV and XLSX files directly in your browser and export them as clean JSON or XML

Here's a few things that makes this converter different: - runs in the browser - all parsing and conversion is client side can handle data any size data - automatically detects delimiters, encodings, and data types as it parses - Live preview with column renaming, search/replace, and data cleanup - Export to JSON or XML — clean, structured output that can be used for API or Databases

backstory: I built this tool for myself. I work with massive CSV and TXT files, some over 10GB, and opening them in Excel would freeze my laptop, some of the online converters only limits to a certain size, so I started learning Python and pandas but ended up wasting so much time trying different delimiters or fixing badly structured data just to make it usable, and I thought this would be a really fun project to build

I'd love some feedback. Thank you

URL: https://csvforge.com

Comments

sverhagen•10mo ago
"Runs in the browser" and "client side" isn't as much of a selling point to me as it's made out to be. It's a claim that I can't really validate until it's too late. If it's a commercial service I'm going to have to pay for, then maybe you should go all the way in gaining my trust with whatever safeguards it takes, so that I no longer care if I upload my data to your server or not.
rustc•10mo ago
> then maybe you should go all the way in gaining my trust with whatever safeguards it takes

What kind of safeguards are possible with a web app?

sverhagen•10mo ago
I think this comes down to legally-enforceable contracts with some teeth. A lot of business seem okay to trust Google's cloud products, or Microsoft's? I think as private person with limited means for litigation, you're likely sol.
hahn-kev•10mo ago
Yeah I really wish there was a way for this to be enforced by the browser that the end user could trust. It would have to be a standard, but outside of opening dev tools and toggling offline mode there's no way to be sure.

The funny thing is that it feels safer to download a desktop app and give it the same data even though it's usually much harder to validate if it's shipping your data somewhere else.

strogonoff•10mo ago
There’s a cheap trick to make sure a website that claims to do everything client-side actually does everything client-side:

1. Open the site in an incognito window.

2. Turn off your Internet.

3. Do what you’ve got to do.

4. Close browser window.

As a bonus, and this makes it better than just flipping the offline switch in developer tools, if you turn off Internet in a way that keeps the browser thinking it’s online, you can also peek at whether any network requests are made (for pathological cases where the app does everything locally but phones home anyway).

Botlabs•10mo ago
Sure, but you can validate it dev tools exist for a reason. Honestly, I just can’t afford the storage costs if users are uploading 50GB+ CSVs. It’d be a huge strain on any server, not to mention painfully slow for users. Running everything client side was the easiest and most practical way to build this MVP at least for me thanks for the feedback
o11c•10mo ago
"Large" generally means "bigger than RAM"; 10GB is medium-sized these days since it fits in most people's RAM. Does the browser actually have the (web worker?) APIs needed to stream and "upload" and "download"?
shubhamjain•10mo ago
I don't get it. Are JSON and XML files more friendly to import vs CSV files? I always assumed CSVs were the standard. Any reasons to prefer structured formats?

Shameless plug: I am working on a similar problem of Excel not being a great tool for large datasets. My desktop app[1] lets you import raw data files and query them using SQL. (The website needs to be updated, the app looks much better than the current screenshots).

[1]: https://textquery.app

Botlabs•10mo ago
yes they are a lot easier to work with when inserting into the database
snappr021•10mo ago
This type of thing is fairly trivial to create with ChatGPT running entirely locally in HTML.

A couple of kb of open standard vanilla js that does some simple things faster than legacy spreadsheets etc ever could.

Even to the point of creating invoices, reports etc based on standard filters stored in local storage…

oschvr•10mo ago
Looks like you made it in lovable. It has that characteristic UI.

If so, how much time did it take you?

Botlabs•10mo ago
thanks for your comment, it took me almost 3 weeks to build this
constantcrying•10mo ago
I think it should go without saying, but never use this with anything more relevant than a hobby project.

Doing this with any kind of data you don't fully own (e.g. data from your company) is a terrible idea, from so many standpoints. That it is "allegedly" running locally is not making it much better.

I think my question to OP is, who is this for. Any developer can write up a convert for his own datasets, in basically any case I can think of where you are handling large amounts of data you are building a pipeline to do cleanup, renaming, conversion, etc. Who wants to have a part of that pipeline be uploading the data into the browser?

CCS – Community Crowdfunding System

https://ccs.getmonero.org/
1•OsrsNeedsf2P•46s ago•0 comments

OpenAI is throwing everything into building an automated researcher

https://www.technologyreview.com/2026/03/20/1134438/openai-is-throwing-everything-into-building-a...
1•bongoman42•2m ago•0 comments

Show HN: ISO 20022 Payments MCP – First standards-typed financial MCP server

https://github.com/scalefirstai/EvolutionAI
1•scalefirst•5m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Free AI Business Plan Generator

https://launchkit-5g9.pages.dev/tools/business-plan-generator/
1•bobbydavro•9m ago•1 comments

Amazon's Trainium lab, the chip that's won over Anthropic, OpenAI, even Apple

https://techcrunch.com/2026/03/22/an-exclusive-tour-of-amazons-trainium-lab-the-chip-thats-won-ov...
1•evo_9•13m ago•0 comments

Storing Solar Energy as Ice for Air Conditioning

https://hackaday.com/2026/03/22/storing-solar-energy-as-ice-for-air-conditioning/
3•lxm•25m ago•0 comments

A short history of the Web – CERN (2019)

https://home.cern/science/computing/birth-web/short-history-web
1•imwally•26m ago•1 comments

Trivy Supply Chain Attack Expands to Compromised Docker Images

https://socket.dev/blog/trivy-docker-images-compromised
2•feross•30m ago•1 comments

The Entropy of the Soul: Why AI Quotas Are the Ultimate Bot-Detection Filter

https://medium.com/@pierreneter/the-quota-paradox-why-ai-limits-are-making-us-smarter-fa7f8ff909bd
1•pierreneter•30m ago•0 comments

eBay Kitchen Beta (home made food ordering)

https://twitter.com/rats7/status/2035845616190787644
1•raybb•32m ago•0 comments

Socialist Emmanuel Gregoire wins Paris mayoral race

https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/3/22/socialist-emmanuel-gregoire-wins-paris-mayoral-race
1•mikhael•33m ago•0 comments

Samsung brings AirDrop support to Galaxy S26 series in select regions

https://www.neowin.net/news/good-news-for-samsung-users-airdrop-support-is-finally-here/
1•bundie•35m ago•0 comments

Show HN: CodexKit – Build agent-powered iOS apps (threads, tools, memory)

https://github.com/timazed/CodexKit
1•timazed•37m ago•0 comments

Show HN: NoProcrast – A browser extension modeled on HN's noprocrast feature

https://addons.mozilla.org/en-US/firefox/addon/noprocrast/
1•xanthine•46m ago•0 comments

Zmx: Session Persistence for Terminal Processes

https://zmx.sh/
1•sgloutnikov•46m ago•0 comments

Hardest Hard Drive Commercial [video]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZXs_9OXRnQo
2•ketchup32613•48m ago•1 comments

Show HN: Sandbox-policy-builder, helper for Vercel Sandbox credentials brokering

https://github.com/giselles-ai/sandbox-policy-builder
1•toyamarinyon•50m ago•0 comments

FIRST Robotics founder Dean Kamen resigns because of Epstein files

https://www.nhpr.org/nh-news/2026-03-12/dean-kamen-resigns-first-epstein-nh-newhampshire
4•benwen•53m ago•0 comments

My DIY FPGA board can run Quake II

https://blog.mikhe.ch/quake2-on-fpga/
2•tapoxi•54m ago•0 comments

Bug Mentor – Mentoring developers with Q&A during software bug resolution

https://raisedal.substack.com/p/bug-mentor-mentoring-developers-with
1•masud2336•59m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Lula – multi-agent coding assistant with sandboxed Rust exec engine

https://github.com/christianmeurer/Lula
1•chrismeurer•1h ago•0 comments

AI ends online anonymity: the ease of unmasking pseudonymous accounts

https://english.elpais.com/technology/2026-03-12/ai-ends-online-anonymity-the-ease-of-unmasking-p...
9•1vuio0pswjnm7•1h ago•1 comments

[Product Launch] Synapse: Define your signals and we'll monitor for them

https://synapsesignal.net/
1•atakaboudi•1h ago•1 comments

【Open Source and Free】a macOS Menu Bar Cryptocurrency Price Monitor

https://twitter.com/realedgelab/status/2035902084244291964
1•mylxsw•1h ago•0 comments

LLMs can't reason and never will

https://pablomarino.com/research_blog/2026/03/23/research5.html
4•pablonm•1h ago•3 comments

Simulation Theory Misses the Point

https://simontlbt.substack.com/p/simulation-theory-misses-the-point
4•simontlbt•1h ago•0 comments

The First Pancake Principle. How to Get Started

https://medium.com/weirdo-poetry/the-first-pancake-principle-a67e374bceea
1•puttycat•1h ago•0 comments

Tesla faces wider probe of self-driving feature

https://apnews.com/article/tesla-selfdriving-musk-regulators-7edce5705e93775e1b8bb77b5dd54007
3•1vuio0pswjnm7•1h ago•0 comments

AI is making the hard choice between consumer safety and privacy even trickier

https://nypost.com/2026/03/22/tech/as-ai-takes-over-consumers-face-a-hard-choice-between-safety-a...
1•1vuio0pswjnm7•1h ago•0 comments

Pandora's Bog: the global energy shock of 2026 [pdf]

https://assets.jpmprivatebank.com/content/dam/jpm-pb-aem/global/en/documents/eotm/pandoras-bog.pdf
2•gwintrob•1h ago•0 comments