About the CSV Unescape
This is a proper CSV reader, not a search and replace. It walks the text one character at a time, tracks whether it is inside a quoted field, and only then decides what a comma or a newline means. That distinction matters: in "Smith, John",42 the first comma is data and the second is a separator, and a naive split would produce three fields instead of two.
Inside a quoted field a doubled double quote collapses back to one, and newlines are kept, so a wrapped spreadsheet cell survives the trip. By default the parsed fields are written back out joined by the delimiter with the quoting removed, which shows you the values as the importing program sees them. Tick the per-line option to get one field on each output line instead, which is easier to scan when you are checking a single column.
Malformed input is reported instead of guessed at. A quote that opens in the middle of a field, or a quoted field that is never closed, produces an error naming the line and column so you can find the row that broke your import. The status line counts fields and rows, which is a fast sanity check when a file is supposed to be rectangular. If you want the data as structured records rather than plain text, CSV to JSON is the next step, and CSV Viewer shows it as a table.
How to use
- Paste the quoted CSV rows.
- Set the delimiter to match your file.
- Tick One field per output line to list the values vertically.
- Copy the unquoted values.
Common questions
- What happens to a comma that was inside a quoted field?
- It stays in the value. Once the quotes come off, that value looks like it contains a delimiter, which is exactly why the quoting existed.
- Does it keep line breaks inside a field?
- Yes. A newline inside quotes is part of the value and is preserved in the output.
- Why do I get an unclosed field error?
- The number of quote characters is unbalanced somewhere above the reported line, usually because a value contained a quote that was never doubled.
- Is a semicolon file supported?
- Yes. Pick semicolon, tab or pipe from the delimiter list and the parser treats that character as the separator.