CSV Delimiter and Encoding Converter

Change a CSV delimiter safely

A delimiter separates fields in a text table. Although the name CSV means comma-separated values, real exports often use semicolons, tabs, or pipes. Regional spreadsheet settings commonly choose a semicolon when a comma is already used as the decimal separator.

Replacing characters with Find and Replace is unsafe because the same character may appear inside a quoted field. This converter parses the source table first and then serializes it with the selected output delimiter, preserving quoted commas, escaped quotation marks, and embedded line breaks.

Supported delimiters

• Comma produces conventional .csv data.
• Semicolon is common in European spreadsheet exports.
• Tab produces TSV data that pastes cleanly into many spreadsheet applications.
• Pipe is useful when ordinary punctuation appears frequently in field values.

Automatic detection examines the input and chooses the most likely delimiter. If a file has only one column or inconsistent rows, select the source delimiter manually.

Fix CSV encoding problems

Text that displays as José or contains replacement characters may have been decoded with the wrong character encoding. Choose the expected encoding before selecting the file. UTF-8 is the preferred modern default; Windows-1252 and ISO-8859-1 are provided for older Western European exports.

Encoding selection applies when reading an uploaded file. Pasted text has already been decoded by the browser and cannot be reliably converted back to its original bytes.

Line endings and spreadsheet compatibility

LF line endings are conventional on Linux and modern macOS. CRLF is the traditional Windows format and may be more compatible with older desktop software. Both are valid for most modern CSV importers.

The converter removes a leading UTF-8 byte order mark before parsing. It does not infer whether values should be numbers, dates, or booleans because CSV itself does not provide a universal data-type schema.

Privacy and limitations

Files are decoded and converted in your browser and are not uploaded to MiniUtil. Available browser memory limits the practical file size. Always review sensitive exports and keep the original file until the converted version opens correctly in its destination application.

Related CSV tools

Use the CSV Viewer to inspect columns and rows, CSV to JSON to create structured JSON, or the JSONL Converter for newline-delimited records.