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?

The bottleneck might be the air in the room

https://blog.mikebowler.ca/2026/07/03/co2-and-decision-making/
70•gslin•1h ago•29 comments

2026 Unslop AI-Written Fiction Contest Results

https://www.hyperstitionai.com/unslop-results
16•networked•2h ago•21 comments

Agentic coding notes from Galapagos Island

https://danluu.com/ai-coding/#appendix-agentic-loops-and-writing-this-post
62•gm678•3h ago•20 comments

Performance per dollar is getting faster and cheaper

https://www.wafer.ai/blog/glm52-amd
216•latchkey•9h ago•67 comments

Leanstral 1.5: Proof abundance for all

https://mistral.ai/news/leanstral-1-5/
198•programLyrique•9h ago•45 comments

Giant trees have no trouble pumping water to top branches: new research

https://news.exeter.ac.uk/faculty-of-environment-science-and-economy/giant-trees-have-no-trouble-...
179•hhs•9h ago•89 comments

Mir Books – Books from the Soviet Era

https://mirtitles.org
38•clmul•3d ago•17 comments

Synthesis is harder than analysis

https://surfingcomplexity.blog/2026/07/03/synthesis-is-harder-than-analysis/
63•azhenley•5h ago•12 comments

Steam Controller Auto-Charge – pilot to magnetic charging puck using CV

https://github.com/FossPrime/Steam-Controller-Auto-Charge
122•zdw•9h ago•25 comments

MSI Center – How to gain SYSTEM privileges in seconds

https://mrbruh.com/msicenter/
73•MrBruh•6h ago•18 comments

SearXNG: A free internet metasearch engine

https://github.com/searxng/searxng
198•theanonymousone•11h ago•52 comments

FreeBSD ate my RAM

https://crocidb.com/post/freebsd-ate-my-ram/
127•theanonymousone•12h ago•45 comments

The firefighting system of the Van der Heyden brothers in 17th century Amsterdam

https://worksinprogress.co/issue/how-amsterdam-invented-the-fire-department/
78•zdw•9h ago•13 comments

Jamesob's guide to running SOTA LLMs locally

https://github.com/jamesob/local-llm
328•livestyle•16h ago•147 comments

David Beazley – Programming Courses

https://www.dabeaz.com/courses.html
53•gregsadetsky•2h ago•16 comments

Odin, Wikipedia and engagement farming

https://katamari64.se/posts/2026/odin-wikipedia/
120•stock_toaster•8h ago•155 comments

Show HN: Classify mechanical faults using Contrastive Language-Audio Pretraining

https://github.com/adam-s/car-diagnosis
11•dataviz1000•2d ago•0 comments

Soatok's Informal Guide to Threat Models

https://soatok.blog/2026/06/30/soatoks-informal-guide-to-threat-models/
72•zdw•7h ago•9 comments

New serious vulnerabilities spiked around release of Claude Mythos Preview

https://epoch.ai/data-insights/cve-severity-spike
91•cubefox•10h ago•31 comments

Applied Category Theory Course (2018)

https://math.ucr.edu/home/baez/act_course/index.html
101•measurablefunc•11h ago•7 comments

Gone but Not Forgotten: Recovering the Dead Web

https://blog.archive.org/2026/04/23/gone-but-not-forgotten-recovering-the-dead-web/
60•wslh•3d ago•13 comments

Costco is the anti-Amazon

https://phenomenalworld.org/analysis/the-anti-amazon/
389•bookofjoe•16h ago•366 comments

Maybe you should learn something

https://www.marginalia.nu/log/a_135_learn/
37•tylerdane•4h ago•20 comments

Reverse-engineering Codemasters' BIGF archive format in Ruby

https://davidslv.uk/2026/06/30/reading-binary-in-ruby.html
11•davidslv•3d ago•3 comments

Study reveals what people see when they read lips

https://news.ku.edu/news/article/study-reveals-what-people-really-see-when-they-read-lips
6•giuliomagnifico•3d ago•0 comments

Infracost (YC W21) Is Hiring a Marketing Lead to Shift FinOps Left

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/infracost/jobs/YTJcFwr-marketing-lead
1•akh•10h ago

Espionage Against the European Parliament

https://citizenlab.ca/research/member-of-committee-investigating-spyware-hacked-with-pegasus/
343•ledoge•11h ago•83 comments

Show HN: A statically typed, cross-platform, easily bootstrappable build system

https://github.com/rochus-keller/BUSY/
30•Rochus•3d ago•10 comments

Hunting a 16-year-old SQLite WAL bug with TLA+

https://ubuntu.com/blog/hunting-a-16-year-old-sqlite-bug-with-tla-is-dqlite-affected
201•peterparker204•3d ago•22 comments

Factories are just rooms

https://interconnected.org/home/2026/07/03/factories
229•arbesman•16h ago•94 comments