CSV Viewer/Formatter

View, format and validate CSV files with table view.

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About CSV Viewer/Formatter

                            
CSV (Comma-Separated Values) is a simple file format for storing tabular data. Format and view your CSV data in a readable format.

                            
Common Use Cases:

                            
    
                                
                                
  • Viewing CSV data in table format
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  • Formatting CSV files
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  • Validating CSV structure
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  • Preparing CSV for import
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              Developers: see the CI/CD & pipeline guide.
              More tutorials: guides hub · by Nalla.
            



            

                
CSV structure and the RFC 4180 standard

                
CSV (Comma-Separated Values) is a plain-text format for tabular data: each line is a record; commas separate fields. Despite its apparent simplicity, CSV has enough edge cases that the IETF formalised a specification in RFC 4180. Fields containing commas, line breaks, or double-quote characters must be wrapped in double quotes; a literal double-quote inside a quoted field is escaped as two consecutive double-quotes (""). These rules are consistently mishandled by hand-written exporters, which is why CSV files from different systems often fail to parse correctly in Excel or Python's csv module.

                
The most common CSV problems: the file uses a different delimiter (tabs, semicolons, or pipes) without declaring it; string values containing newlines break parsers that process line-by-line; inconsistent quoting (only some fields quoted) causes off-by-one column alignment; and character encoding issues (Windows-1252 vs UTF-8) corrupt accented characters. Paste your CSV here to view it as a formatted table and spot alignment problems before importing into a database or spreadsheet.

                

                    
DelimiterExtensionCommon source

                    
                        
Comma ,.csvExcel, Google Sheets, most databases

                        
Tab \t.tsvUnix tools, genomics data, some BI tools

                        
Semicolon ;.csvExcel in locales where comma is decimal separator (EU)

                        
Pipe |.psvLegacy financial systems, some ERPs

                    

                

                
CSV vs JSON vs XML for data exchange

                
CSV is the right format when the data is flat (one entity per row, no nesting) and the recipient is Excel, a BI tool, or a data analyst. JSON is better for nested structures and APIs. XML is required by legacy enterprise systems and document-oriented data. CSV has the smallest file size and fastest parse times for flat tabular data, but no standard way to represent null vs empty string, or to carry column type metadata, recipient systems have to infer types. If type fidelity matters, JSON or a typed format like Parquet is more reliable for data pipelines.

                
Related: JSON formatter, XML formatter, Number formatter for numeric columns.

            




            
            

                

                    

                        

                            
Frequently Asked Questions

                            



                                

                                    

                                    
CSV (Comma-Separated Values) is a plain text format for tabular data where each row is a line and each column is separated by a comma. It is universally supported, every database, spreadsheet application, data science tool, and programming language can read and write CSV. It has no version incompatibility, no proprietary format, no required software, and can be opened in a plain text editor. This universality makes it the standard for data export and interchange.

                                

                                

                                    

                                    
Values are quoted when they contain a comma, a newline, or a double-quote character, all of which would otherwise be interpreted as CSV delimiters. For example, an address "123 Main St, Suite 4" must be quoted to prevent the comma from being read as a column separator. Our CSV parser handles quoted values correctly, including the edge case of escaped quotes inside quoted fields (represented as two consecutive double quotes: "").

                                

                                

                                    

                                    
Semicolon-delimited files (common in European countries where the comma is used as a decimal separator) are a TSV/DSV variant, not strict CSV. Our viewer expects comma-delimited data. To view semicolon files, do a find-and-replace to swap semicolons for commas before pasting, being careful not to replace semicolons that appear inside quoted fields.