About

Data processing tasks often begin with a chaotic block of text that defies easy analysis. Developers and data analysts frequently encounter log files or CSV exports where thousands of records exist on a single line. This structural mismatch prevents direct importation into SQL databases or spreadsheet software like Excel. The Text to Column Converter addresses this by parsing the raw string based on specific delimiters and restructuring the data into a vertical format. Precision in this conversion is essential to prevent data corruption during migration. This utility handles common edge cases such as trailing whitespace or accidental empty entries that often occur during manual copy-paste operations.

Formulas

The transformation logic views the input text as a sequence of characters that must be partitioned into a vector of strings. We define the input set S containing the raw text and a delimiter d.

V = {

trim(x)for each x ∈ split(S, d)if x ≠ EMPTY

Reference Data

Delimiter Name	Symbol	HTML Entity	Common Context	ASCII Code
Comma	,	,	CSV (Comma Separated Values)	44
Semicolon	;	;	European CSVs, Programming Statements	59
Pipe (Vertical Bar)	\|	\|	HL7 Messages, Shell Pipelines	124
Tab (Horizontal)	→		TSV files, Excel Copy-Paste	9
Space			Command Line Arguments, Natural Text	32
Colon	:	:	CSS Rules, JSON Keys, MAC Addresses	58
Ampersand	&	&	URL Query Parameters	38
Carriage Return	↵		Classic Mac OS, Network Protocols	13
Line Feed	↓		Unix/Linux Systems	10
Tilde	~	˜	Directory Paths, Legacy Systems	126
Caret	^	ˆ	Regular Expressions, XOR Operations	94
Unit Separator	␕		Mainframe Data Streams	31

Frequently Asked Questions

This tool focuses on a single primary delimiter to ensure consistent structural integrity. If your data uses commas and semicolons interchangeably, we recommend running the conversion twice or performing a find-and-replace operation in a text editor to normalize the delimiters before using this tool.

To maintain high performance and predictability for general users, strict character delimiters are used. However, the "Custom" option accepts single characters or specific string sequences. For complex regex-based splitting, a dedicated regex parser would be more appropriate.

This is a raw string splitter. It does not respect CSV escaping rules where delimiters inside double quotes are ignored. It will split the text exactly where the delimiter appears. For complex CSV files with escaped quotes, a dedicated CSV parser is recommended over a raw splitter.

If you enabled "Remove Empty Lines" or "Remove Duplicates", the tool filters the result set. A string like "apple,,banana" split by a comma would produce three items (one empty). Enabling filters removes that empty middle item.

Yes. The processing happens entirely in your browser's memory using efficient string manipulation methods. You can comfortably process strings with hundreds of thousands of characters, though performance depends on your local device's available RAM.