Show HN: Edit CSV Files Online | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: Edit CSV Files Online

editcsvonline.com

3 pointsrobbiejs5 comments

Hello HN,

I’m Robbert, the creator of editCSVonline.com.

editCSVonline is a free web app for editing CSV files online in a spreadsheet-like matter.

It uses two Javascript libraries: the first is PapaParse for parsing CSV files, the second is DataGridXL for the spreadsheet-like editing. (I am the author of DataGridXL: I was very happy to see the lib reach the front page on Hacker News some three months ago.)

I have created editCSVonline for a couple of reasons:

1) It's nice for anyone to not have to resort to Google Sheets or Microsoft Excel to edit a simple CSV file.

2) I use simple tools like this (tools that aid developers) all the time: tools like JSON linters, favicon generators or SVG icon finders. This is my free help-a-fellow-dev web app.

3) To promote my Javacript product DataGridXL.

Please let me know if you have any suggestions or comments!

I tried this. When I download a csv, I get a lot of comas. Excel automatically ignores the last empty rows and columns.

Also, the file use LF, but the users of window expect CR/LF.

Does it handle quoted comas inside cells?

Happy to receive some feedback.

It does not ignore empty cols/rows.

I am not sure if it handles quotes commas.

Will definitely look at both issues and the CR/LF issue, thanks for reporting. I am not a CSV expert yet as you might have noticed.

Is this a tool that you would use if these issues are resolved?

There are like a million of variants of CSV. They have the same problem than regular expressions or markdown. Each implementation adds a new trick, or feature or special case, and all of them are slightly incompatible.

I usually just open Excel. One of the problems/features with Excel is that it use the local configuration to write the csv. I'm from Argentina, so IIRC the default configuration is to use semicolons instead of comas, and the decimal point is a coma. (Add that to the feature request list, but perhaps you can try to adapt to the USA market first, that is more uniform but has enough configuration options.) Sometimes I need a csv, but the the other program only understands the non-localized version of the csv, so I have to open it in a text editor and replace the semicolons with comas.

I sometimes use the version of csv that use tabs instead of comas, it it probably worth adding soon. And there is an option to use many spaces to keep the data in columns.

Also, there is an old post by patio11 about reading csv instead of writing them: https://www.kalzumeus.com/2015/01/28/design-and-implementati... (HN https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8960280 | 107 points | Jan 28, 2015 | 35 comments) Perhaps it has something relevant.

When is programming ever easy?

The app uses PapaParse which is a JS lib for parsing/converting CSV to JSON and vice versa. I believe it has many settings built-in, tab-vs-comma delimiter (or somicolons), etc. (see here: https://www.papaparse.com/docs#config). Right now, I am using defaults.

I think I will add an "Advanced Save" option that lets the user tweak the CSV export format. Hopefully PapaParse takes care of that, best case scenario... :-)

Thank you very much for your comments!

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