Show HN: ExcelJSON – Convert JSON To/from CSV, TSV Easily | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: ExcelJSON – Convert JSON To/from CSV, TSV Easily

exceljson.com

50 pointspalerdot26 comments

Not trying to bash your project here, but why would I use a website for that when I can do it programmatically from the command line, without sending you my data?

Get-Content foo.json | ConvertFrom-Json | Export-Csv foo.csv

Very valid point. But there are programmers, non technical people out there for whom this might be of some help. I was using a initial version of this tool locally and one of my friends found this tool helpful. I was also peeking it into vuejs at that time, so I thought of rewriting the tool in vueJS. I also threw some CSS into it and currently hosting it for free using Github Pages just to see if it is useful for people out there in real world.

PS: I'm the creator of this tool. This tool is a client side app and makes use of browser's File API to read and parse files. Source code - https://github.com/palerdot/exceljson

Ah, I didn't realize it was happening client-side. That makes a lot more sense.

To be honest, for your target audience, I'd charge a buck a conversion :)

PowerShell PM here. You just made my day :)

Shameless plug, we're still in alpha, but this already works great with PowerShell 6 on Mac and Linux as well: https://github.com/powershell/powershell/releases

Plug aside, the service looks great for quick conversions when PS isn't available (especially on mobile). Nice job with it. :)

What language / shell is that? Powershell?

That would be Powershell.

I created a dummy spreadsheet in Excel 2013 and saved as CSV. When I try to upload it gives "Invalid File. Please upload only csv, tsv files."

To eliminated any propriety meta data, I just saved a vanilla text file as csv and it gives me the same error.

Excel has the annoying habit of outputting localised CSV. What does your CSV look like? This should work:

    "A","B"
    "a1","b1"
    "a2","b2"

I create a new file in notepad and save it as simple.csv with exactly this content and I get "Invalid File. Please upload only csv, tsv files."

Also be sure to switch it off of "plain text file" or it'll save as file.csv.txt (though if you have 'hide common file extensions' off you'd've noticed this in your file browser)

iirc notepad auto prepends .txt anyways if that value isn't changed.

Weird. I'm on Linux though, but I can't imagine that the line endings should matter.

Sorry for the naming confusion. This tool does not deal with MS Excel files which are binary files and needs specialized programs (like MS Office/libre office) to make sense out of it. This tool just reads plain text CSV/TSV Files. Also this is just a browser based tool reading the plain text CSV/TSV files and there is no server side program processing it.

What does this have to do with Excel? It doesn't convert from or to excel files. It converts to/from csv/tsv and json. Talk about false advertising.

I just needed a domain name for hosting it. I have already clarified that currently this tool does not read/parse excel binaries. May be in future, it may do that. Sorry for the confusion.

Why is it called ExcelJSON if it converts from and to JSON and TSV/CSV?

Just came up with a random name as I needed a domain name for hosting.

I tried https://exceljson.github.io, but that didn't work. What is the *.github.io sitename? That way, you've got HTTPS from the get-go.

Because the site is served from [0], Github Pages uses the CNAME file if avalible [1], therefore the github.io site [2] redirects to the custom domain [3]. Github Pages does not allow HTTPS on custom domains yet.

[0] https://github.com/palerdot/exceljson

[1] https://github.com/palerdot/exceljson/blob/master/CNAME

[2] https://palerdot.github.io/exceljson

[3] http://exceljson.com/

This is cool but I have to wonder: what's the use case for this?

I wanted to upload the json you get from khan academies api to hopefully flatten it to a csv format my mother can use to map their curriculum against ours.

Otherwise I need to wip that script up I promised I do over xmas.

I know one... having to exchange data with Windows systems/users...

Using a library like this[0] might be a useful addition, so users won't need to export as a specific format.

[0] https://github.com/SheetJS/js-xlsx

if you want to do JSON to CSV, TSV at scale, fast and with sse42 optimizations you could try: https://github.com/tamediadigital/je

If you're working with JSON, you probably know how to use the command line (or at least, you ought to). And if you know how to use the command line, you should just install csvkit[1]. Then you can just do `in2csv in.ext > out.csv` and `csvjson in.csv > out.json`.

[1]: https://csvkit.readthedocs.io/

Good work guys! I will definitely use it on a daily basis. Is it free?

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