CSV delimiter detection

Every CSV tool has a delimiter setting that defaults to automatic detection. The parser examines the first rows and picks the character that produces the most consistent column count.

When detection fails

• The file has one column, so there is nothing to detect.
• The data itself contains many semicolons or pipes inside quoted fields.
• The first few rows are unrepresentative — a title row above the real header, for example.
• The delimiter is a space, which is ambiguous with the spaces inside values.

Setting it explicitly

Choose the delimiter from the dropdown rather than leaving it on automatic. The status rail always shows which delimiter was used, so you can check the guess before trusting the result.

Files that arrived from Excel

In locales that use a comma as the decimal separator, Excel writes semicolons. If a file opens as one wide column, that is almost always why. The delimiter converter will turn it into a comma-separated file, re-quoting any values that need it.