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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo 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•8mo ago
yes they are a lot easier to work with when inserting into the database
snappr021•8mo 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•8mo ago
Looks like you made it in lovable. It has that characteristic UI.

If so, how much time did it take you?

Botlabs•8mo ago
thanks for your comment, it took me almost 3 weeks to build this
constantcrying•8mo 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?

Bose is open-sourcing its old smart speakers instead of bricking them

https://www.theverge.com/news/858501/bose-soundtouch-smart-speakers-open-source
1281•rayrey•3h ago•210 comments

Iran Goes Into IPv6 Blackout

https://radar.cloudflare.com/routing/ir
134•honeycrispy•2h ago•49 comments

The Jeff Dean Facts

https://github.com/LRitzdorf/TheJeffDeanFacts
258•ravenical•5h ago•94 comments

IBM AI ('Bob') Downloads and Executes Malware

https://www.promptarmor.com/resources/ibm-ai-(-bob-)-downloads-and-executes-malware
15•takira•19m ago•1 comments

Lights and Shadows (2020)

https://ciechanow.ski/lights-and-shadows/
188•kg•5d ago•26 comments

Dynamic Large Concept Models: Latent Reasoning in an Adaptive Semantic Space

https://arxiv.org/abs/2512.24617
23•gmays•2h ago•3 comments

I used Lego to design a farm for people who are blind – like me

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c4g4zlyqnr0o
50•ColinWright•3d ago•7 comments

Project Patchouli: Open-source electromagnetic drawing tablet hardware

https://patchouli.readthedocs.io/en/latest/
386•ffin•13h ago•41 comments

Tamarind Bio (YC W24) Is Hiring Infrastructure Engineers

https://www.ycombinator.com/companies/tamarind-bio/jobs/HPRZAz3-infrastructure-engineer
1•sherryliu987•1h ago

A closer look at a BGP anomaly in Venezuela

https://blog.cloudflare.com/bgp-route-leak-venezuela/
321•ChrisArchitect•11h ago•165 comments

Show HN: DeepDream for Video with Temporal Consistency

https://github.com/jeremicna/deepdream-video-pytorch
46•fruitbarrel•5h ago•17 comments

Open Infrastructure Map

https://openinframap.org
343•efskap•15h ago•83 comments

Chinese AI models have lagged the US frontier by 7 months on average since 2023

https://epoch.ai/data-insights/us-vs-china-eci
28•gmays•58m ago•18 comments

The Napoleon Technique: Postponing things to increase productivity

https://effectiviology.com/napoleon/
202•Khaine•3d ago•103 comments

Japanese electronics store pleads for old PCs amid ongoing hardware shortage

https://www.tomshardware.com/desktops/pc-building/major-japanese-electronics-store-begs-customers...
94•speckx•3h ago•53 comments

Kernel bugs hide for 2 years on average. Some hide for 20

https://pebblebed.com/blog/kernel-bugs
257•kmavm•16h ago•131 comments

The price of fame? Mortality risk among famous singers

https://jech.bmj.com/content/early/2025/11/30/jech-2025-224589
41•ingve•4d ago•38 comments

The Rise of Computer Games, Part II: Digitizing Nerddom – Creatures of Thought

https://technicshistory.com/2026/01/02/the-rise-of-computer-games-part-ii-digitizing-nerddom/
8•rbanffy•4d ago•0 comments

Digital Red Queen: Adversarial Program Evolution in Core War with LLMs

https://sakana.ai/drq/
16•hardmaru•2h ago•1 comments

Signals vs. Query-Based Compilers

https://marvinh.dev/blog/signals-vs-query-based-compilers/
19•todsacerdoti•3d ago•1 comments

Go.sum is not a lockfile

https://words.filippo.io/gosum/
144•pabs3•14h ago•64 comments

He was called a 'terrorist sympathizer.' Now his AI company is valued at $3B

https://sfstandard.com/2026/01/07/called-terrorist-sympathizer-now-ai-company-valued-3b/
24•newusertoday•33m ago•2 comments

Nvidia Kicks Off the Next Generation of AI with Rubin

https://nvidianews.nvidia.com/news/rubin-platform-ai-supercomputer
12•TSiege•52m ago•3 comments

Tailscale state file encryption no longer enabled by default

https://tailscale.com/changelog
339•traceroute66•22h ago•132 comments

Our Changing Planet, as Seen from Space

https://e360.yale.edu/digest/nasa-satellite-images-2025
42•YaleE360•3h ago•2 comments

Lessons from Hash Table Merging

https://gist.github.com/attractivechaos/d2efc77cc1db56bbd5fc597987e73338
60•attractivechaos•6d ago•13 comments

The Q, K, V Matrices

https://arpitbhayani.me/blogs/qkv-matrices/
189•yashsngh•1d ago•75 comments

ICE's Tool to Monitor Phones in Neighborhoods

https://www.404media.co/inside-ices-tool-to-monitor-phones-in-entire-neighborhoods/
175•cmurf•1h ago•119 comments

The virtual AmigaOS runtime (a.k.a. Wine for Amiga:)

https://github.com/cnvogelg/amitools/blob/main/docs/vamos.md
109•doener•17h ago•29 comments

Musashi: Motorola 680x0 emulator written in C

https://github.com/kstenerud/Musashi
111•doener•17h ago•14 comments