Convert a Text File to CSV

Turning a text file into a CSV that other software will actually accept

A text file that already has values separated by something is most of the way to being a CSV. What stops it being one is usually a handful of small things: the separator is a tab rather than a comma, the first few lines are a report header rather than data, and the values are unquoted, so anything containing a comma will break the moment something reads it back.

This page fixes those. Load the file, say what separates the fields, say how many lines to skip and whether the first remaining line names the columns, and the output is written with proper quoting throughout.

Quoting is the part that matters

The CSV format has one rule that everything downstream depends on: a value containing a comma, a double quote or a line break must be wrapped in double quotes, and any quote inside it must be doubled. A converter that ignores this produces a file that looks correct in a text editor and reimports with every column after the offending value shifted by one. Every field here goes through that rule, so the output reimports cleanly into Excel, Numbers, Google Sheets, a database loader or anything else that reads the standard.

Header rows, and lines that are not data

Exported reports frequently begin with a title, a run date and a blank line before the actual table starts. Those lines are not records, and leaving them in gives you a CSV whose first row is a report title and whose column count is wrong. Set the number of leading lines to skip and they are dropped before anything else happens. If the file has no header at all, untick the header option and columns are named column_1 onwards, so the output is still valid rather than losing its first record.

Which separator to choose

Tab is the default here because a text file exported from almost anything — a database client, a report writer, a spreadsheet's "save as text" — is tab-separated far more often than comma-separated. Comma, semicolon and pipe are the other common ones, semicolon being standard in regions where the comma is a decimal separator. Any whitespace handles a report whose columns are aligned with padding rather than separated by a character.

Where this differs from splitting text

This page is file-in, file-out: a .txt on disk becomes a .csv on disk, with a filename derived from the original. Split text into columns is the paste-and-transform version — text in your clipboard, a grid on screen, CSV or XLSX out. If you want a formatted spreadsheet rather than a plain CSV, text to Excel produces a real workbook, and CSV to PDF goes the other way when the result needs to be read rather than processed.

Next steps