About

Mismatched delimiters corrupt CSV imports, break decimal parsing across locales, and silently produce wrong numerical results. European systems use commas as decimal separators where Anglo systems use periods. Swapping a file between these conventions without a reliable replacement pass leads to data loss or truncated rows. This tool performs exact global substitution of any single-character or multi-character delimiter in your text. It operates entirely in-browser with zero server calls. Limitation: it performs literal string matching, not context-aware parsing. A comma inside quoted CSV fields is treated identically to a field separator. For strict RFC 4180 compliance, use a dedicated CSV parser.

Formulas

The replacement operation is a literal global substitution across the entire input string S. Given a source delimiter d_src and a target delimiter d_tgt, the output is:

S_out = replaceAll(S_in, d_src, d_tgt)

The replacement count n equals the number of non-overlapping occurrences of d_src in S_in. Internally this uses a compiled regular expression with all special regex characters escaped via the pattern escape(d_src) = d_src.replace(/[.*+?^${}()|[\]\\]/g, "\\$&") to guarantee literal matching regardless of input content.

Where S_in = input string, S_out = output string, d_src = source delimiter, d_tgt = target delimiter, n = total replacements performed.

Reference Data

Mode	Source	Target	Typical Use Case
Comma → Period	,	.	EU-to-US decimal conversion
Period → Comma	.	,	US-to-EU decimal conversion
Comma → Semicolon	,	;	CSV for European Excel (list separator = ;)
Comma → Tab	,	\t	TSV generation for database import
Comma → Space	,		Readable list formatting
Comma → Pipe	,	\|	Pipe-delimited flat files (EDI, legacy systems)
Comma → Newline	,	\n	One-item-per-line lists
Semicolon → Comma	;	,	EU CSV back to standard CSV
Tab → Comma	\t	,	TSV-to-CSV conversion
Pipe → Comma	\|	,	Legacy flat-file to CSV
Colon → Comma	:	,	/etc/passwd style to CSV
Newline → Comma	\n	,	List to inline comma-separated values
Custom	User-defined	User-defined	Any arbitrary delimiter swap

Frequently Asked Questions

No. This tool performs literal global string replacement. It does not parse CSV structure or respect quoting rules per RFC 4180. If your text contains quoted fields with commas that must be preserved, you need a context-aware CSV parser. This tool treats every occurrence of the source delimiter identically.

If your numbers use both dots as thousand separators and commas as decimal separators (e.g., 1.234,56), a single-pass comma-to-period replacement will produce 1.234.56 which is incorrect. You need a two-pass strategy: first replace the thousand-separator dot with a temporary placeholder (e.g., #), then replace commas with periods, then replace # with commas. Use the Custom mode for each pass.

The tool runs entirely in your browser using JavaScript's native string operations. Modern browsers handle strings up to several hundred megabytes. Practically, text under 10 MB processes instantly. For files above 50 MB, you may notice a brief pause. There is no server-side limit since no data leaves your device.

Yes. Switch to Custom mode and enter the full multi-character source string including spaces. The regex engine escapes all special characters, so any literal string works as a delimiter - including sequences with brackets, pipes, or other regex-sensitive characters.

If your source text is a simple CSV without embedded commas in quoted fields, the output will be a valid TSV. The tool inserts a real tab character (U+0009). You can download the result as a .tsv file using the Download button. Note that if any field contains a literal tab character, the TSV structure will break.

Yes. The tool does not normalize line endings. Whatever line-ending style exists in your input (\r\n for Windows, \n for Unix, \r for legacy Mac) is preserved in the output unless you explicitly choose to replace one of those sequences.