Paste your broken CSV here and click "Fix CSV!!" to repair itEnter Broken CSV

What is CSV Fixer?

Got a CSV that won't import? Ragged rows, unescaped quotes, the wrong delimiter, a stray BOM, smart quotes copy-pasted from a Word doc — any of these can blow up Excel, pandas, or your database loader. CSV Fixer reads your messy CSV (Comma-Separated Values) and returns a clean version that actually parses.

Unlike JSON, CSV has no strict spec — RFC 4180 is a guideline, not a law. Excel, Google Sheets, Postgres COPY, and Python's csv module all bend the rules differently. This tool repairs the structural issues that cause hard parse failures: column-count drift, unbalanced quotes, lines that quietly broke in the middle of a quoted field. Once it's clean, run it through our CSV Validator to confirm.

Your data never leaves your computer in a way you can see — we just repair the bytes and hand them back. No accounts, no signups, no storing your subscriber list on our server.

How to Use the CSV Fixer

Three steps. Each one matches a button on this page — there is nothing hidden.

Paste Broken CSV or Load the Sample

Drop your CSV into the left editor. Click Sample CSV to load a deliberately broken telecom file with the kinds of errors people actually run into — a half-quoted field, a row missing its last column, an extra trailing column. Example of broken CSV:

subscriberId,name,plan,monthlyFee,status
SUB-1001,"Ava Chen",Unlimited 5G,79.99,active
SUB-1002,Marco Rivera,"Family Plan,79.99,active
SUB-1003,"Priya Patel",Prepaid 10GB,active
SUB-1004,"Lee, Jordan",Unlimited 5G,79.99,suspended,extra-column

Row 2 has an unclosed quote. Row 3 only has 4 fields. Row 4 has an extra trailing column. All three are typical real-world breakage.

Click Fix CSV!!

Hit the green Fix CSV!! button. The fixer detects the delimiter (comma, semicolon, tab, or pipe — handy for European exports that use ;), repairs quoting per the RFC 4180 rules, and pads or trims rows so every line has the same column count.

Review the Fixed CSV

The right panel shows the cleaned-up CSV. Skim it, copy it, and load it into your database, spreadsheet, or pipeline. If it still misbehaves, paste it into our CSV Validator for a second opinion or our CSV Formatter to align the columns visually.

When You'd Actually Use This

Database Import Failures

Postgres COPY and MySQL LOAD DATA INFILE are unforgiving — one stray quote and the whole file is rejected. Fix the file, retry the import, go home on time.

Excel & Google Sheets Exports

European Excel exports use ; as the delimiter and prepend a UTF-8 BOM that breaks pandas read_csv. The fixer normalises the delimiter and strips the BOM so your pandas pipeline just runs.

Hand-Edited Data

Someone opened the CSV in Notepad, fixed a typo, saved it — and now the line endings are mixed and the row count is off by one. The fixer handles mixed \r\n/\n, ragged rows, and trailing whitespace without you having to spot the diff manually.

Migrations Between Tools

Moving customer or product data from one SaaS to another and the receiving tool refuses the import? Run the file through here first — most of the rejections are quote-escaping or column-count issues that the fixer cleans up in one pass.

Common Questions

Is my CSV stored or sent anywhere I can't see?

Your CSV goes to our backend so the fix can run, then comes straight back. We do not log your file contents and we do not keep them. Sensitive data — PII, payment data, anything covered by an NDA — should not go through any online tool, ours included. For that, run a local Python csv script.

What kinds of CSV errors can it actually fix?

The common ones: ragged rows (rows with fewer or more columns than the header), unescaped quotes inside quoted fields, fields containing commas or newlines that should be quoted but aren't, mixed \r\n/\n line endings, a stray UTF-8 BOM at the start, smart quotes pasted from word processors, and the wrong delimiter being used consistently. Per RFC 4180.

Will it change my actual data values?

No. The tool repairs structure and quoting. It does not invent rows, drop rows of real data, rename headers, reorder columns, or convert numbers to strings. If a cell says "79.99", it stays "79.99".

Does it auto-detect the delimiter?

Yes. It looks at the input and picks comma, semicolon, tab, or pipe based on what is consistent. The output keeps the same delimiter, so if you started with semicolons you end with semicolons.

What about really huge files?

There is a 64 KB cap on the input. For bigger files — gigabyte-scale exports, log dumps — use a streaming tool like csvkit or a quick pandas script. CSV repair on a 2 GB file is not really an interactive task.

It said it can't fix my CSV. Now what?

Some structures are too ambiguous to repair safely — for example, a file where you can't tell whether a comma inside a field was meant to be a separator or a literal comma. In those cases, eyeball the first few lines, fix the worst offender by hand, then run it through here again for the rest. You can also try our CSV Validator to see exactly which line is upsetting the parser.

Other CSV Tools You Might Need

Fixing CSV is one step. Once it parses cleanly, these tools take it the rest of the way: