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Display any CSV file as a searchable, filterable, pretty HTML table
I combined this with a simple API to update a CSV file using Deno/deno-csv library, allowing an Ansible job to easily update a CSV file via the API with Ansible URI module, and then have that same CSV file viewable/downloadable in a simple and easy/dashboardy way (with CSV-to-html-table). Copilot created the Deno/deno-csv CSV API code and then with a little back and forth I added static website functionality (to serve the CSV table), and I had a /view and a /update route. I'm just a sysadmin but I love piecing together stuff like this. Thanks Derek!
- mattsouth 1y agoNice. Its interesting to me that searching and filtering isnt something that http://csvbase.com http://csvbase.com has.
- indigodaddy 1y agoI looked at that too for my use case. It was super cool, but I needed something to utilize a CSV that I did not have to initially upload through webui, and also wanted it to be downloadable, so this hit those checkboxes for me.
- promiseofbeans 1y agoHow does this handle CSV's with no headers, or data that's offset from the top? (e.g. a row for title and subtitle, before the table headers & data)
- indigodaddy 1y agoI combined this with a simple API to update a CSV file using Deno/deno-csv library, allowing an Ansible job to easily update a CSV file via the API with Ansible URI module, and then have that same CSV file viewable/downloadable in a simple and easy/dashboardy way (with CSV-to-html-table). Copilot created the Deno/deno-csv CSV API code and then with a little back and forth I added static website functionality (to serve the CSV table), and I had a /view and a /update route. I'm just a sysadmin but I love piecing together stuff like this. Thanks Derek!
- neilv 1y agoObligatory suggestion to developers who use this: Don't copy&paste reuse that custom formatting code from the demo for arbitrary CSV, since the code inserts arbitrary strings into both HTML attribute value and CDATA contexts, without escaping special characters. return "<a href='" + link + "' target='_blank'>" + link + "</a>";
- rafaelgoncalves 1y agothe creator even acknowledged the risk in the sample... but i do not understand why not create a more secure sample first time? since people will absolutely copy to test.
- indigodaddy 1y agoDang, I'm not the author, so do not think this should be a show HN, at least not with me remaining as the submitter. I did not submit it as such, and then later an admin edited it to a show HN, and put my comment (that I added for context later for how I made use of the tool) as the description. That blurb currently as the description should probably be returned to a plain comment. All I did was stumble upon Derek's repo when I was looking for something to stitch together for a particular use-case.
- gnabgib 1y ago[flagged]
- indigodaddy 1y agoEh? I'm not Derek.
- squigz 1y ago[flagged]
- indigodaddy 1y agoI didn't submit it as a show HN, and that description was originally just a comment that I had added some time later (an admin changed it to show HN and moved my comment to be the description)
- deleted 1y ago[deleted]
- dang 1y agoJust in case it's unclear: when we see someone submitting their own work, we often put Show HN in the title. But occasionally we misidentify the submitter as the author and do this incorrectly. That's what happened here. It's fixed now!
- nurettin 1y ago
- pphysch 1y agoI was wondering why this wasn't expressed as a webcomponent, then saw it's a decade old. Nice.
- vasvir 1y agoHa I didn't notice the date but I did notice that was based on datatables.net a very cool library.
- strunz 1y agoLove this idea, wish I could pipe a CSV right to the tool though!
- stevenpetryk 1y agoCould be easy enough to make a CLI tool that opens a browser to an HTML file in /tmp
- sn0n 1y agoThis is amazing!! I finally have an excuse to use spreadsheets again! I've been avoiding them for years, Legitimately.
- dddw 1y agoWhat did you use instead?
- 65 1y agoPretty cool. I'm wondering how large of a CSV you could feasibly load with this. I always have to manually open CSVs in text editors if they're too large for Excel, so if this is a better UI for it that can handle large files I will definitely use this.
- indigodaddy 1y agoPerhaps setting paging to true would improve the handling of a very large CSV
- joseangel_sc 1y agoi’m gonna test this on a 52k rows document, very curious if it can handle that
- indigodaddy 1y agoPerhaps turn paging on in the config for a very large CSV?
- hermitcrab 1y ago52k rows is a large CSV? BWAHAHAHA. I guess it is all relative.
- 34f34f3 1y agoAlternatively, feed your spreadsheet file (CSV, XLS, whatever) to Google Sheets and then select File > Download > Web Page (.html) – especially when you have a ton of formatting (font, colors, borders, whatnot)... the result looks great!
- bryanhogan 1y agoBut does this include options for sorting and filtering?
- nathell 1y agoAlternatively, use visidata (https://www.visidata.org/ https://www.visidata.org/) in the terminal. Supports xls/xlsx too! One of my favourite tools for terminal data exploration (along with jq, fx, and jet).
- ThrowawayTestr 1y agoDoes that do the Excel thing where it crushes all the numbers to exponents?
- 6510 1y agoI wrote this long ago. Looking at it I'm really a master spaghetti coder. https://jsfiddle.net/ypfr98su/5/ https://jsfiddle.net/ypfr98su/5/
- Propelloni 1y agoSpaghetti code is underrated.
- magesh_magi1 1y agoHa, I'm working on a similar utility with some extra features also enabling WASM that might help in case of larger files.
- szszrk 1y agoI know PowerShell is surrounded with polarized opinions, but that's one of the things it's amazing for. Import-Csv with Out-GridView gives nice results and it can be just a one-liner wrote from memory. Just a reminder that it's possible and often built into our work environments, while we pretend it's not there.
- rahimnathwani 1y agoI don't use Windows as my daily driver, so I had no idea Import-Csv existed until last week, when I pasted a shell command that I had run on my Mac, and asked it to write something that would work for Windows (for my colleague). I hadn't understood how different Powershell is, compared with cmd.exe of old.
- razakel 1y agoThey should really have called it PowerScript. It's the full blown .NET ecosystem.
- bblb 1y agoPowerShell is the first thing I install on my Linux workstation/jump host because of those built-in Import/Export/Convertto goodies. Import-Excel module works on Linux too. Too bad the Invoke-WebRequest uses basic parsing only, it used to parse the actual DOM with JS and all, but I guess that was a security issue.
- majkinetor 1y agoNah, that required IE which isn't available on Linux.
- porridgeraisin 1y agoDoes it write UTF16 on linux too? That's my biggest gripe with powershell redirections and Out-File's on windows.
- 1y ago
- bryanhogan 1y agoI was actually looking for something like this! It seems to be a bit old though, does it work well? Also I can't seem to filter columns? Are there other tools like it? Got a collection of larger CSV files that I wanted to include on a Astro Starlight project of mine.
- waltbosz 1y ago> I'm just a sysadmin but I love piecing together stuff like this. I'm a developer and piecing stuff together is my favorite part of the job. The joy is in the design, the actual coding is just a means to an end. I've written similar browser tools for handing tabular data. One neat thing I've learned is if you copy and paste from Excel into an html `textarea`, you get the data as tab delimited text. Add a `paste` event handler to the `textarea` then parse the data in code.
- datax2 1y agoNot for nothing, you could do this with Streamlit and 30 seconds of vibe coding. you can also use Kanaries if you are looking for some more detailed "Tableau" like analytics platform.
- indigodaddy 1y agoWhy would you want to vibe code a whole python server setup when someone already made this that you can just plug and play? Id understand if you need a lot of different features, but to me this is neat and ticks a lot of boxes.
- hk1337 1y agoI kind of want to fork it and work out the jQuery dependency. *EDIT* Would probably be easier to start a new one and maybe use PapaParse to parse the CSV.
- catapart 1y agoMy first thought too. Though, I'll probably write it as a custom element so that I can pass a csv path to it via an attribute. Seems like a really handy thing to have, and I'm already working on a similar type of thing for pdfs. Definitely in the 'everything is a nail' phase of building a library of custom elements.
- hk1337 1y agoI was thinking just a table element with data attributes and maybe a class name.
- catapart 1y agoFor sure! I was just thinking of wrapping that table with an element so I don't have to call "load" or "init" or whatever from a separate script. I'm a big fan of html that works well and tables are pretty awesome for tabular data.
- indigodaddy 1y agoI think this fork actually uses papaparse. I actually thought it was slightly less attractive though and also it did not have the download csv capability: https://github.com/pavelsr/csv-to-tablesorter https://github.com/pavelsr/csv-to-tablesorter
- RUnconcerned 1y agoThis is neat. I had a recent need to do something similar, but ended up using Grist CSV Viewer[1], which I think is a bit more feature complete. I had ChatGPT create an HTML file that would let me paste the CSV instead of loading a specific file and it worked pretty well while being more convenient than loading the CSV into Google Sheets or whatever. [1] https://www.getgrist.com/csv-viewer/ https://www.getgrist.com/csv-viewer/
- hilti 1y agoThank you for sharing this! I‘m using pivottable.js but I noticed that it‘s sometimes hard to understand by my colleagues. Will Grist definitely give try.
- CommenterPerson 1y agoNice work! Immediately usable.
- nashashmi 1y agoCustom formatting should be called js column wrapper. I thought custom formatting would be changing colors and widths text wrappings. And maybe add a head wrapper?
- 1vuio0pswjnm7 1y agoI use sqlite3 for this task because I use a text-only browser to read HTML. It has no Javascript engine. The HTML tables prooduced by sqlite3 do not require Javascript.
- schwartzworld 1y agoThat was my thought. Sqlite3+datasets works great for this
- davidcollantes 1y agoIf the author is here, I would love a JSON to pretty HTML table too (with all the features this one has)!
- cbeach 1y agoDatasette (open source project by @simonw, 10K stars on GitHub) excels at this: https://datasette.io/ https://datasette.io/ Plugins like datasette-extract (AI powered data extraction) are amazing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3NtJatmQR0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g3NtJatmQR0
- indigodaddy 1y agoDatasette isn't really comparable to this. This is just about a simple, clean, webview of a CSV. Datasette isn't exactly that, and for sure not out of the box like that nor as simple to plug and play for this exact use case. Datasette is obviously awesome and very powerful, it's just a different tool and don't think it overlaps much with most use cases of this particular project.
- ederderek 1y agohey all - I'm the creator of this tool. very cool to see a project I wrote 10 years ago get some recognition. Sorry about the jQuery. Pull Requests welcome!
- o1nder 1y agoLoved the tool. Modified it so you can drag and drop CSV files in the browser instead of having to pull and run locally, and of course credited you. Hosted on Github Pages here (https://thomasinch.github.io/csv-to-html-table/ https://thomasinch.github.io/csv-to-html-table/), but made it a single index.html so it can be downloaded and used offline. Cheers!