Easiest way to quickly browse a CSV or XML datafeed's contents?

**hobbsy** · 12-12-10

This might be a stupid question but is there any easy way to browse a datafeed's content just so you can take a look inside - eg check out the structure, see which columns/fields are being used, and maybe search for a specific item

What's the best programme to use for this?

Large .CSV files tend to choke up in Notepad / Notepad++ / Excel
and with XML I don't know how to browse these efficiently

Any suggestions? (preferably free/open source software)

I have Price Tapestry handy - so would the recommended solution just be to load it into a new PHPAdmin/MySQL database on a WAMP install? Is there an easier/quicker way?

**dc000000** · 12-12-10

I have a price tapestry install on a spare site and keep it empty so when I want to use a new feed I can upload it and mess around. It's handy for filtering out all the categories and so on. Then I have a preprepared list of filters to apply when I use it on the intended site.

**jonsp** · 12-12-10

What I do with .csv files is open Excel and go to Data -> Import External Data then browse to your csv. It will ask what the delimiters are | , etc then import the file . You only get the first ~30k records but that should be enough to get the gist of the file.

**D-Mac** · 12-12-10

Internet Explorer handles XML well

**stuartqwh** · 14-12-10

Hi,

To browse, edit and generally mess about with .csv files I use the excellent CSVed freeware program by S J Francke

CSVed 1.2.2

Hope that helps.

Regards,

Stuart.

**jramroop** · 15-12-10

Originally Posted by hobbsy

This might be a stupid question but is there any easy way to browse a datafeed's content just so you can take a look inside - eg check out the structure, see which columns/fields are being used, and maybe search for a specific item

What's the best programme to use for this?

Large .CSV files tend to choke up in Notepad / Notepad++ / Excel
and with XML I don't know how to browse these efficiently

Any suggestions? (preferably free/open source software)

I have Price Tapestry handy - so would the recommended solution just be to load it into a new PHPAdmin/MySQL database on a WAMP install? Is there an easier/quicker way?

Hi I wrote a simple script to do just that. You can find it on my blog at James Ramroop

Hope that helps.

**lowndsy** · 10-01-11

Find some free software called SQLYog (community edition) - it lets you connect to a mysql database and load stuff from a csv straight in, without using an online interface like PHOMyAdmin or PriceTapestry. As far as I know it doesn't have the 65k row limit, so it's also handy to preview csv files. I use the paid enterprise version, but that's for stuff like http tunneling - the free version is fine for most stuff.