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About CSV Delimiter Detector Online
This tool inspects a CSV file or pasted CSV text and tells you which delimiter is being used: comma, semicolon, tab, pipe, or other. It works by analyzing the consistency of field counts across rows for each candidate delimiter and picking the one that fits best.
Different regions and tools use different delimiters: US Excel uses commas, German Excel uses semicolons because numbers there use commas as decimal separators, exports from databases often use tabs to avoid quoting issues. Misidentifying the delimiter is the most common cause of CSV import failures.
The tool also detects quote characters, line endings, and BOM markers — all the metadata you need to configure a parser correctly. Useful before importing into Excel, R, Python pandas, or any data tool.
How to use this tool
How to guess the delimiter of a CSV sample
Paste a CSV sample
Drop the first few lines of your CSV into the "Sample" field. A single line with column headers is usually enough — the detector only looks at the first non-blank line.
What it counts
The tool counts occurrences of comma, semicolon, and tab in that first line and ranks them. Pipes (`|`), spaces, or custom delimiters are NOT considered.
Press Run
Result returns counts (per-delimiter occurrence count), likelyDelimiter (the winner), and hint (`heuristic` when there was clear separation, `ambiguous` when all counts were 0).
When to override
On lines with quoted fields containing the candidate delimiter (e.g. `"hello, world"`) this naive count overestimates. For tricky CSVs feed a couple of data lines instead of just the header.