CSV Viewer

A CSV viewer that shows how your file really parses

Opening a CSV in a text editor gives you a wall of commas, and opening it in a spreadsheet app can silently change values. This CSV viewer renders the file as a plain HTML table instead, exactly as a CSV parser reads it: each record is a row, each field a cell, and nothing is reformatted behind your back.

That makes it useful for a quick look at an export and also for checking a file before you import it somewhere else. If the columns line up here, a standards-compliant importer will usually read them the same way.

Example: a European export with semicolons

Accounting and banking software in many European locales writes semicolon-separated files, because the comma is already the decimal separator:

Datum;Kunde;Betrag;Bezahlt
03.01.2024;"Weber; Sohn GmbH";1.250,00;ja
05.01.2024;Kaya AG;89,90;nein

With the delimiter on Auto-detect, the Preview tab shows four columns and two data rows, and the status bar reads 2 rows. The quoted customer name keeps its semicolon, and amounts such as 1.250,00 are displayed unchanged rather than being guessed into a different number.

What you see in each tab

• Preview – the table itself, with a sticky header row, alternating row shading and a light or dark look that follows your system theme.
• Code – the same data as a JSON array of objects, one per row. It is handy when you want to copy a few records into a test or confirm which values were read as numbers.
• Status bar – the number of rows, or a parse error with the record number where the file breaks.

The viewer is read-only. To correct a value, edit the text in the input editor and the table updates while Auto update is on.

Options explained

• Delimiter – Auto-detect handles commas, semicolons, pipes and tabs in most files. Choose one explicitly when a file has only one or two columns or when detection picks the wrong character.
• First row is header – on by default. Untick it for headerless files such as raw log exports; the first line then appears as an ordinary row and the JSON becomes a list of arrays.
• Detect numbers & booleans – affects the JSON in the Code tab. Numbers without leading zeros and the words true and false become typed values; everything else, including 0,12 or 007, stays text.

Diagnosing a broken CSV

A viewer is often the fastest way to see why an import failed. A few patterns to look for:

• Everything sits in one column. The file uses a different separator from the one expected. Switch the delimiter and watch the table split correctly.
• Fewer rows than lines. Some cells contain line breaks inside quotes, such as addresses or comments. That is valid CSV, and the table shows the text on several lines within one cell.
• Headers such as column3 or email_2. The header row had an empty cell or a repeated name. The viewer names them so that no column is lost, which hints that the source file needs a proper header.
• An error naming a record. A double quote was opened and never closed, or a quote inside a quoted value was not doubled. Fix that record and the rest of the file appears.

A byte order mark at the start of the file, as written by Excel when saving as UTF-8 CSV, is removed automatically, and blank lines are skipped.

Typical uses

• Checking a contact export from a CRM or newsletter service before importing it elsewhere, to confirm that names with commas stayed in one column.
• Opening a CSV attached to a support ticket or email without starting a spreadsheet program that might reformat dates and IDs.
• Verifying the output of your own script, for example a Python or Node job that writes a report, including its quoting and line endings.
• Getting a few rows as JSON to use as test fixtures.

Viewer or converter?

Use this page when you want to look at the data. When you need it in another format, CSV to JSON gives you indentation and nesting options, and CSV to Excel produces a real workbook for people who work in spreadsheets. For .xlsx files you received, the Excel viewer shows each sheet the same way.

Privacy

Files are parsed and rendered locally by your browser; they are not uploaded to our server. The exceptions are Load URL, which retrieves the file through our server, and Save & Share, which stores it so the link works.