When I was writing the previous post, I found numerous scenarios which JSON Table Editor unable to handle. These scenarios are based on three factors:

1. Separator. Is the column separated by comma? Or tabs? Or fixed length?
2. Name. Does the data has the column names in the beginning? Does these names only contained in one line? Or it’s spread across multiple lines?
3. Start Location. Does the data started from the first line? Or we need to ignore a number of lines before arrive at the data?
4. End Location. Does the data all the way to the end of the file? Or there are non-data lines at the end of the file?

The earlier version of CSV-handling functionality didn’t consider above factors. It simply assume that your CSV is comma-separated (Duh!). It has header on the first line. And the data goes all the way until the end of the file. Which is way it might not for your use-case.

The good thing is, I have take these factors into consideration. Without further ado, below are some of the test scenarios:

1. Standard CSV file. Source file: LINK. Loaded in Editor: LINK
2. Standard CSV file without header. Source file: LINK. Loaded in Editor: LINK
3. TAB-separated text file without header. Source file: LINK. Loaded in Editor: LINK
4. Text file with fixed-length columns. Source file: LINK. Loaded in Editor: LINK
5. Fixed-length columns text file where the header is not on the first line. Source file: LINK. Loaded in Editor: LINK
6. Fixed-length columns text file where the header is multi-lines. Source file: LINK. Loaded in Editor: LINK

What do you think? Is there any other factors that I can incorporate into the Editor?

Since my last post, I’ve been adding new features to JSON Table Editor. Here are the enhancements:

1. Button labels and tool-tips.
   As I carefully observe the page, I asked myself whether the user interface is intuitive enough. From there, I changed some of the button labels with a clearer text. I also added additional information whenever user hover above certain controls. Hopefully this will make the UI less confusing.

   

   

   On the sub-level, the “Output to JSON” button is changed to “Finish Editing”.

   

2. Instantly load remote JSON/CSV file.
   Not sure why I never think of this feature before. Now we can make the editor to automatically load a remote JSON/CSV file by passing parameters.
   Example:
   • using URL parameter: Load Remote JSON file
   • using URL and CSV parameters: Load Remote CSV file
   • using URL, CSV and SEP parameters: Load Text Data with Tab as separator
3. URL Shortener.
   The URL described in point no. 2 will be very long. Sharing this long URL is definitely look ugly. Thus, I added option to shorten the URL whenever a remote JSON/CSV fis is successfully loaded.

   

4. Upload to Paste Sites
   A long time ago, a user complained why he can’t save the JSON output to other online storage like Google Docs/Spreadsheet. Since I don’t think a JSON file will fit nicely to a Google Spreadsheet, I decided to look other alternatives on storing text online. After short research, I picked Hastebin, Pastebin and DPaste as the upload destination. Purely due to the easiness to use their API.

   

That’s all guys. Looking forward to your feature request, bug reports! Cheers!