Split Text by Delimiter

Excel’s Text to Columns is handy, but only once the data is in Excel. Often you have a block of pasted text instead: names and emails separated by commas, values joined with pipes, “key: value” lines, or a long post that has to be cut into parts. Paste it here and choose where to split.

Into columns

Each line becomes a row, and each piece between separators becomes a cell. The preview labels the columns A, B, C like a spreadsheet, pads shorter rows with empty cells, and lets you download the table as CSV, Excel or TSV. Turn on trimming to remove the spaces that usually follow a comma, so “Lee, Ann” gives “Lee” and “Ann” rather than “ Ann”.

Quoted values

A value that contains the separator itself, like “Austin, Texas”, would normally be cut in two. With “Respect quoted values” on, text in double quotes stays together, and two double quotes inside a quoted value stand for one, as in CSV files. This works for single-character separators such as commas, semicolons, tabs and pipes.

Limiting the number of splits

Set “Split at most” to cut each line only a certain number of times; the rest of the line stays together in the last piece. Splitting “Subject: Re: invoice” once at the colon gives “Subject” and “Re: invoice”. It is the safest choice for key-value lines, log entries and anything where the separator can also appear inside the value.

Regular expressions

When the separator varies, use a pattern. \s*[,;]\s* splits at a comma or semicolon with any surrounding spaces, \s{2,} splits at runs of two or more spaces (useful for text copied from aligned reports), and \s+[-–]\s+ splits at a dash with spaces around it. An invalid pattern shows an error under the box instead of a result.

Into lines, or equal pieces

“Into lines” writes every piece on its own line, turning “a, b, c” into a list. “Into equal pieces” ignores separators and cuts the whole text into pieces of a fixed size, counted in characters or in words. Character counts treat emoji and accented letters as one character each, so nothing is cut in half. A size of 280 gives post-sized parts, and the longest piece is shown as a check.

Private by default

Splitting happens in your browser and the text is never uploaded, so customer lists and exports stay on your device.

A worked example

The line Chen, Bo, [email protected], “Austin, Texas” split at commas with quotes respected and trimming on gives four columns: Chen, Bo, [email protected] and Austin, Texas. Without “Respect quoted values” the last value would be cut into “Austin” and “Texas” and the row would have five columns. Download the table as Excel and each value is already in its own cell.

Choosing the right separator

Look at a few lines before choosing. Commas are common in names and addresses, so a comma split often needs quoted values or a limit on splits. Tabs almost never appear inside values, which is why data copied from spreadsheets splits cleanly at tabs. Pipes and semicolons are popular in exports from databases and European software. If the separator varies, a regular expression handles all variants in one pass.

Related tools

Join the pieces again with Column to Comma-Separated List, convert tab-separated text with TSV to CSV, or change the separator of a whole file with Change CSV Delimiter.