SVG Viewer

SVG is a text-based image format — the file is XML markup describing shapes, paths and fills, not pixels — which makes it as easy to paste and inspect as HTML, and this tool does exactly that: paste the source, see it rendered, check the file size, and export it either as a downloadable file or as a data URI string.

The render happens inside a sandbox with scripts blocked. That matters specifically for SVG, because unlike a PNG or JPEG, SVG is a document format capable of embedding JavaScript inside <script> tags — a genuine and historically exploited attack vector. Sandboxing means a file you did not write, downloaded from somewhere you do not fully trust, can be previewed here safely.

Copying as a data URI

A data URI encodes the whole SVG as a string that can be dropped directly into a CSS background-image property or an <img src> attribute, with no separate file request. For small icons — a chevron, a checkmark, a simple logo mark — this saves a network round trip, which genuinely helps on pages with many small icons.

The trade-off is size: base64-encoding inflates the data by roughly a third, and past a couple of kilobytes of source that overhead outweighs the saved request. For anything beyond simple icon-sized SVGs, a normal linked file is usually the better choice.