I’ve had two major frustrations while troubleshooting and doing QA for clients lately:
1. The new POST beacons don’t split up prettily in debuggers (like Charles proxy).
2. Even if they did, it can be hard to compare beacons to each other if they don’t have the same number of variables.
So, as a pet project in the evenings, I’ve been working on a tool to solve for these problems. Today I introduce: the Beacon Parser!
I don’t consider it done yet, but it’s ready for Beta testing, perhaps. I am positive there are probably better ways to accomplish what I’ve done- I’m no development genius- but I must say i’m pretty happy with the result. I would love for a few folks to provide feedback, if possible.
Current Features:
- If you enter multiple beacons, It aligns rows for similar variables across beacons.
- You can export the table to a “csv” file. Note, in certain browsers (including firefox), you will need to add the “.csv” extension to the downloaded filename.
- If your beacon includes “varName.”/”.varName” variables (clickmap, context data), it will concatenate all the currently “open” variables to output one variable/value pair:

Features I’m still working on (in order of ambitiousness):
- I definitely still need to work out some bugs (see bottom of this post).
- It doesn’t currently work great with incomplete beacons.
- A “clear button”.
- I’d like to sort the variables back to their original order- currently as you add new beacons that have variables the previous beacons did not, it just adds them to the end.
- I’d like to have columns for notes on the purpose of the variable, and data quality if there’s anything clearly broken (like character limits being exceeded).
- I’d love to connect to the Admin API and return the names of custom variables.
I’d also love to create a W3C data layer parser.
Known bugs (already). I will try to fix sometime this evening:
- It breaks when the current or referring URL has query params in it. Kind of a big problem.
- It struggles with some products strings.