Graham Knapp

E57 file xml extractor

written by Graham Knapp on 2025-01-26

See the xml portion from the end of an .e57 pointcloud file. This contains information like the bounding box of the pointcloud, the number of points and how the points and other information are organised in the file.

I wrote it with a bit of help from Claude ai by describing what I wanted and pasting a description of the e57 file format before doing a lot of debugging to get the entire xml section and then integrating it with my blog.

I find the e57 file format a bit wierd - it starts with a header including a file version number and an offset to the XML portion, which comes at the end of the file so you need to read both ends of the file before you can understand the middle bit. So if you download the file you have to wait for it to finish downloading - you can't start to interpret or display the points and other data whilst streaming data.

This tool is written in JavaScript and runs in your browser - no files are uploaded to any server (in fact this blog has no backend server - it is a static web site - it is downloaded and runs entirely in your browser).