Check and repair CSV files online
CSV is a text table in which separators divide values into columns. An incorrect separator, a missing quote or a short row can prevent a service from importing the file. CSV Doctor helps you find these problems, preview selected repairs and download CSV or Excel (.xlsx).
Use it to prepare product catalogs, inventory lists, CRM exports and data for reports. Codes such as 001234 remain strings during processing. The tool checks the file’s structure; requirements specific to the destination service still need to be checked separately.
How to check and clean your CSV
1. Upload a .csv, .tsv or .txt file, or paste your data. The separator and encoding are detected automatically. If the columns or letters look wrong, choose them manually. Turn off the header option if the first row contains data.
2. Review the findings. Red marks structural errors, amber marks values to check and blue marks formatting. Click a finding to locate the source row. Select a column to check duplicate keys, then enable only the repairs you need.
3. Compare Original and With fixes. Padding adds missing cells without discarding extra fields; duplicate removal keeps the first row for each nonempty key. Undo repairs if needed. Resolve structural errors, then download the result.
Common CSV problems and what to do
Uneven rows: enable consistent column counts if empty cells are appropriate. Unclosed quotes: inspect the source before closing the final quote. Text after a closing quote or quotes inside an unquoted field usually need manual editing; the tool does not guess the intended field boundaries.
Garbled letters: first try the correct file encoding. The text repair can reverse some recoverable encoding errors, but cannot recreate lost characters. Leading zeros, long identifiers, date-like values and formula-like text are warnings to review, not values to replace automatically.
Should you download CSV or Excel?
Choose Excel (.xlsx) when you need to preserve product codes, leading zeros and long IDs. Every cell is saved as text, including dates and formula-like values. Convert cells intentionally later if you need calculations in your spreadsheet.
Choose CSV when another service requires a text table. Match its required separator and line endings; UTF-8 BOM can help Excel recognize the encoding. CSV has no cell types, so Excel may reinterpret values on opening. For a cell over 32,767 characters, download CSV to retain its full text.
Frequently asked questions
Is it free, and is my file uploaded? The tool is free and requires no account. Processing happens in your browser; the file contents are not uploaded to our server or saved by the tool after you reset it.
Which files and sizes are supported? Use CSV, TSV or TXT up to 10 MB, 50,000 data rows, 200 columns and 500,000 cells. Supported separators are comma, semicolon, tab and pipe. Supported encodings are UTF-8, Windows-1251/1252 and UTF-16LE/BE.
Why is downloading disabled? Resolve red structural errors and make sure there is at least one data row. Use source editing for complex quote problems. You can also download a JSON check report with issue totals and samples of the findings and changes.