Guides

Choose the right CSV separator and encoding

CSV is a text table, but the separator is not always a comma. European exports often use semicolons; tab-separated exports use tabs. A comma inside a quoted cell is part of the value, not a new column.

Auto detection examines separators outside quotation marks. For unusual files, choose comma, semicolon, tab or pipe explicitly. A Name;City header should show two columns with the semicolon option. If you get one wide column, your separator may be wrong.

UTF-8 is the default. Choose Windows-1254 for legacy Turkish exports, Windows-1252 for many Western European exports, or UTF-16LE for relevant Unicode exports. The browser rejects invalid UTF-8 instead of silently replacing characters.

Each row must have the same number of cells. Quote text containing separators or line breaks and double embedded quotation marks: "Ada, Inc." is one cell. If parsing fails, fix the original export rather than deleting arbitrary separators.