List Converter
Paste a list — it converts live. Your list never leaves your device.
The gap between a spreadsheet cell and a script
Lists rarely arrive in the shape you need them. You copy a column out of a spreadsheet and it's newline-separated, but the script you're feeding it into wants one comma-separated line. Or you have a quick comma list of tags and need it one-per-line to paste into a form. This tool handles that conversion instantly, in either direction, without opening a spreadsheet or writing a one-off script.
It's deliberately simple: a delimiter splitter, not a CSV parser. It won't understand quoted fields with embedded commas, but for the everyday case — plain lists of names, tags, SKUs, or IDs — it does the job in one paste.
Worked example
Paste apple, banana, cherry ,, date with input set
to auto-detect (no newlines here, so it finds the commas), output
set to newline, "Trim whitespace" on, and "Remove empty items" on.
The double comma between "cherry" and "date" would normally leave
a blank item — with "Remove empty items" on, that blank is
dropped, and the extra spaces around "cherry" and "banana" are
trimmed. The result is four clean lines:
apple
banana
cherry
dateItems in: 5. Items out: 4 — the empty item from the double comma is correctly dropped.
Frequently asked questions
What does auto-detect do?
Auto-detect follows a simple newline-priority rule: if your pasted text contains any line breaks, it treats each line as one item (ignoring commas or semicolons inside a line). Only if there are no line breaks does it look for a delimiter — trying commas first, then semicolons. This matches the most common real case: text copied from a spreadsheet column is already newline-separated, and single-line text is usually a comma or semicolon list.
Does it handle quoted CSV fields with commas inside them?
No — and we'd rather say that upfront than have it silently mangle your data. This is a simple delimiter splitter, not a full CSV parser: it doesn't understand quoted fields, escaped quotes, or commas that are meant to be part of one value. It works best for simple, unquoted lists — names, tags, SKUs, one value per item. For genuinely quoted CSV with embedded delimiters, use a dedicated CSV parser.
Can I convert a comma list to quoted-comma for code?
Yes — turn on "Wrap each item in quotes" with comma as the output delimiter, and each item comes back as "item", with any internal quote marks escaped as double double-quotes (""). That's a quick way to turn a plain list into something you can paste directly into an array literal or a SQL IN (...) clause.
Does it remove duplicate items?
No — this tool only reformats delimiters, it doesn't deduplicate. If you also need to drop repeated items, run the result through our duplicate-line-remover, which is built specifically for that and offers case-insensitive and whitespace-trimmed matching.