Convert Semicolon CSV to Comma Safely
A CSV that opens in one Excel column often uses a different separator from the importer. Convert the table structure with a parser rather than replacing every punctuation mark.
By Utilify team · Updated
Identify the source separator
Open the file in CSV Viewer and inspect the detected separator and column count. A semicolon export needs semicolon parsing even if some cells contain ordinary commas. Select the input delimiter manually when detection produces one column or the wrong shape.
Input (semicolon): name;city;note Ada;Paris;"contains, a comma" Output (comma): name,city,note Ada,Paris,"contains, a comma"
Preserve quotes and embedded line breaks
Use CSV Delimiter Converter to choose the source and target separators. The converter parses fields first and writes them with the quoting needed for the target format. A blind search-and-replace can change a decimal comma or a separator inside a quoted address, corrupting the record.
A quoted cell can contain a line break, so the number of text lines is not necessarily the number of records. Compare parsed row and column counts before and after conversion. When producing TSV, use the dedicated CSV to TSV tool to decide how embedded tabs and newlines should be handled.
Check the import, not just the download
Validate the converted CSV and import it with the matching separator and encoding. Check accented text, leading-zero IDs and a few quoted cells. Changing the delimiter does not automatically repair an encoding mismatch or prevent a spreadsheet from interpreting an identifier as a number.