Show HN: CSVshare – Instantly share data with anyone and make it searchable | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: CSVshare – Instantly share data with anyone and make it searchable

csvshare.com

50 pointsjasoncrawford20 comments

Cool project, I had a same issue like author mentioned with sharing csv files in Google sheets so recently I made a utility to convert csv files to HTML table - https://github.com/vividvilla/csvtotable it works offline also and generates single HTML file which can be shared or hosted anywhere. Here is a demo of HTML file generated - https://cdn.rawgit.com/vividvilla/csvtotable/2.1.0/sample/go...

I just tried out the service. Some feedback:

1. It would be nice if I could upload CSVs that are gzip compressed.

2. When I download the CSVs it would be good if the filenames included gz at the end as of now they're written out as a series of random characters followed by a .csv extension.

3. Time columns have been transformed after I downloaded the file I just uploaded. The date is in US format and the time information is lost. 2010-12-01 13:51:00 became 12/1/10.

4. When trying to view a 50K row CSV on your site Chrome slows to a crawl.

5. I originally tried to upload a 1-million-row x 9 column, 33 MB, gzip compressed CSV. It would be good if the service limits could allow for something like this.

This service should do one better than just sending a CSV via email and having the other party opening it up in Excel.

The idea is great. The internet needs a simple and useful tool like that.

However, it fails when I try to browse a .txt file (which is CSV, believe me) based just on its extension. Also, it is way too slow. I've opened the longest rivers example the site has offered me and couldn't even search, scrolling was difficult.

I wonder why I would use this when I can use google spreadsheets?

* Faster & easier to upload

* Anyone can search/query like a database

* Data can be downloaded in CSV or JSON format, manually or via API

Hope that helps!

I can download a google spreadsheet to CSV also. I agree that you are faster to setup to upload a csv

For some reason you can't upload directly on a google sheets website but you can do the following workflow:

1. Open google drive and drag it to there

2. Open the file on google drive and select spreadsheets.

I like your faceted queries and the JSON format might be appealing. Also Google sheets has an API. https://developers.google.com/sheets/api/

Is my information that I upload public to anyone or private?

Yeah, I've always found it clunky and awkward to upload CSVs to Google Sheets.

Re public: see my response to @jordache, it is either public or “unlisted”, but in either case it is available to anyone who has the link.

You can? Oh, that's great, because I can't. Although the actual spreadsheet runs smoothly, the web interface of Google Drive is horribly slow on my computer. Also, if I want to share or just quickly browse a CSV, it will be stored on my account and make a big mess on my files.

Not to mention that I must have a Google account and that Google will automatically read my data and associate it with me.

Very nice Jason.

I know I'm always bugging you about Fieldbook APIs (this is Nate K again), but is there an api for creation here?

I have a super-duper-cool use case in mind but it involves POSTing an in-memory CSV rather than manually clicking (but I don't want to clutter my fieldbook namespace).

Doesn't exist yet but definitely something we're thinking about, mind sharing the use case? Can ping me privately (jason@fieldbook)

I wonder if they've thought about the CSV injection attacks that were posted to HN recently...

Yes, we have. Those attacks don't apply to viewing data on CSVshare, which doesn't have the vulnerabilities of Excel or Google Sheets. However, be careful about opening CSVs in Excel or Google from CSVshare or any other source, unless you trust the person who uploaded them.

Very nice. I made a system to search CSV files at http://gosharedata.com but I it is only available as a download and not online, so I like CSVShare, very cool!

Is there anyway you could put exported file size or total number of rows on the detail page (for those interested in analyzing medium-large sets).

Good idea, for now one quick thing you can do is enter this in the search bar:

count()

And that will tell you how many rows there are.

I assume this is meant for use of none sensitive data? What do you do with the uploaded files?

This is for sharing, with no account/password required. The uploaded data is made available at a web page. If you choose “public”, it will be included in a public index; the only other option right now is “unlisted”. Unlisted pages aren't in the public index, but are available to anyone who has the link.

For very sensitive data, that you would want to password-protect, don't upload it right now. We may offer accounts and/or password-protected data in the future.

Thanks!

I assume you didn't ask that question for images posted to imgur, plaintext files posted on pastebin or comments posted on HN.

A business model that might work for enterprises (assuming they find the tool useful)

Why do you think it would work for enterprises?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com