Text Separator & Delimiter Converter

Comma-separated values, pipe-delimited exports, tab-separated columns, semicolon-split configuration strings. Each one eventually needs to be read as a list, and every list eventually needs to be packed back into a single string for an API call, a spreadsheet cell, or a terminal command. Text Separator handles both directions without requiring a spreadsheet application or a code editor to do it.

Two modes cover the full round trip. Join Lines takes one item per line and stitches them together with any delimiter you choose. Split by Delimiter does the reverse: it breaks a delimited string apart and places each token on its own line. The Swap & reverse button feeds the current output straight back as the next input and flips the mode in a single click, so you can verify a round trip without copy-pasting.

Worked Example: Converting a List to a CSV Row

Click Load Sample in Join mode to paste five words (Apollo, Credo, Integrity, Excellence, Innovation) one per line. With the Comma preset active, the output is Apollo,Credo,Integrity,Excellence,Innovation, 5 tokens joined, ready to paste into a spreadsheet row or a SQL IN (...) clause.

• Switch to Comma+space for a more readable result: Apollo, Credo, Integrity, Excellence, Innovation. The token count stays at 5 regardless of the delimiter width.
• Hit Swap & reverse and the joined string becomes the new input in Split mode. Press nothing else and the output immediately shows the five words back on separate lines. This confirms that the delimiter round-trips cleanly without duplicating or dropping tokens.
• The Trim whitespace checkbox is on by default. It strips leading and trailing spaces from every token before joining or after splitting. This is the non-obvious feature that prevents a copied CSV row with spaces after commas from producing tokens like  Credo with a leading space intact.

What Each Preset Delimiter Produces

• Comma: no space. Use for CSV, SQL IN, and array literals.
• Comma+space: one space after the comma. Matches natural English lists and most style guides.
• Pipe: space, pipe, space. Matches Markdown table columns and many log formats.
• Semicolon: semicolon and space. Matches PATH-style environment variables on Windows and certain locale-aware CSV exports.
• Tab: a literal tab character, shown as \t. Matches TSV files and terminal commands that require tab-delimited input.
• Space: a single space. Use to reconstruct a sentence from a word-per-line list.
• New line: a literal newline. Useful in Join mode to insert a blank line between joined blocks.
• Custom: any string you type, including multi-character sequences.

Tricky Inputs: Empty Tokens, Large Files and Custom Delimiters

• Splitting a,,b on a comma produces three tokens: a, an empty string, and b. Tick Skip empty tokensto drop the empty string and get two. The checkbox affects both modes.
• An empty custom delimiter in Split mode is blocked with Delimiter cannot be empty in Split mode. Splitting on an empty string would produce one character per line, which is rarely what is wanted and is handled by the Shuffle Characters mode in the Text Shuffler tool instead.
• Inputs over 50,000 characters are rejected with Input exceeds 50,000-character limit.
• All processing is local. No text is sent to any server.