frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

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

https://csvforge.com
41•Botlabs•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y 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•1y ago
yes they are a lot easier to work with when inserting into the database
snappr021•1y 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•1y ago
Looks like you made it in lovable. It has that characteristic UI.

If so, how much time did it take you?

Botlabs•1y ago
thanks for your comment, it took me almost 3 weeks to build this
constantcrying•1y 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?

AI Has No Wisdom and Neither Will You

https://alexn.org/blog/2026/09/22/ai-has-no-wisdom-and-neither-will-you/
80•dimonomid•45m ago•64 comments

AMD's random number generator can't generate a 0?

https://board.flatassembler.net/topic.php?t=24261
135•BruceEel•4h ago•79 comments

Can gzip be a language model?

https://nathan.rs/posts/gzip-lm/
221•networked•6h ago•80 comments

MiMo v2.6

https://mimo.xiaomi.com/mimo-v2-6
953•volf_•16h ago•430 comments

Will Open Source Survive the Agents That Replaced It?

https://albertoarena.it/posts/will-open-source-survive-the-agents-that-replaced-it/
14•albertoarena•51m ago•17 comments

Type Punning in C and C++

https://blog.pwkf.org/2026/09/21/correct-type-punning-in-c.html
29•ingve•1h ago•10 comments

Spymarks, Not Watermarks

https://brand.io/article/spymarks/
511•possibilistic•13h ago•127 comments

9 Ads per Minute: FIFA Cup 26 – "the price of the beautiful game"

https://www.bristol.ac.uk/news/2026/september/world-cup-viewers.html
105•KellyCriterion•2h ago•125 comments

Video games inspire great UX (2019)

https://jenson.org/games/
9•andsoitis•1d ago•0 comments

Transformers Explained Visually

https://poloclub.github.io/transformer-explainer/
475•aray07•17h ago•74 comments

Attention is all you have

https://alicegg.tech/2026/09/21/attention
883•zer0tonin•22h ago•266 comments

I said no and Apple said yes

https://dbushell.com/2026/09/22/apple-intelligence/
358•thatslast•4h ago•269 comments

What Sun got wrong

https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2026/09/20/what-sun-got-wrong/
614•chmaynard•22h ago•352 comments

A font that reads what you wrote

https://rohanadwankar.github.io/posts/semfont.html
38•RohanAdwankar•2d ago•19 comments

MiMo-v2.6-Pro: Intelligence, Performance and Price Analysis

https://artificialanalysis.ai/models/mimo-v2-6-pro
103•theanonymousone•8h ago•39 comments

Verda (Finland) raises $189M in Series B

https://verda.com/blog/what-189m-in-funding-unlocks-for-verda-customers
47•cmrdporcupine•3h ago•16 comments

I don't want to read what you didn't write

https://blog.colinbreck.com/i-dont-want-to-read-what-you-didnt-write/
780•mooreds•14h ago•318 comments

AI coding has made CI a bottleneck, so we reworked ours to keep up

https://linear.app/now/ci-bottleneck-reworked
268•julian_digital•17h ago•313 comments

Engineering Memory: On learning to memorize first 100 digits of pi (2024)

https://gregorygundersen.com/blog/2024/12/21/engineering-memory/
29•fuzzythinker•1d ago•16 comments

Divide by depth for instant 3D

https://gabrieloc.com/2026/09/15/perspective.html
177•gabrieloc•2d ago•32 comments

NASA’s Mars Sample Return mission is dead

https://www.science.org/content/article/nasa-s-mars-sample-return-mission-dead
414•Muhammad523•17h ago•338 comments

What It's Like to Work in One of America's Data Centers

https://www.wsj.com/business/what-its-like-to-work-in-one-of-americas-data-centers-b4358003
27•JumpCrisscross•1d ago•14 comments

World Wide Words

https://www.worldwidewords.org/genindex.html
27•Petiver•2d ago•2 comments

Looking forward to Git 2.56 – and 3.0

https://lwn.net/SubscriberLink/1094575/2385e98583715c2b/
155•chmaynard•13h ago•80 comments

A build graph that rolls dice

https://fzakaria.com/2026/09/20/a-build-graph-that-rolls-dice
7•ingve•1d ago•1 comments

The Advisory Group on Mathematics and Artificial Intelligence

https://terrytao.wordpress.com/2026/09/21/advisory-group-on-mathematics-and-artificial-intelligence/
146•digital55•17h ago•73 comments

Claude Status – Elevated errors for multiple models

https://status.claude.com/incidents/7g1qpkyz5gxh
125•corvad•11h ago•98 comments

HERMES radio enables voice and data communication over vast distances

https://spectrum.ieee.org/hermes-shortwave-radio-digital-data
154•SamuraiLion•20h ago•62 comments

Python Workers are now generally available

https://blog.cloudflare.com/python-workers-ga/
243•torutofu•23h ago•39 comments

Socrates vs. the Written Word (2011)

https://wondermark.com/socrates-vs-writing/
56•spectraldrift•12h ago•32 comments