Comma separator

Paste a column, one item per line, or a row copied from a spreadsheet, and it becomes one line. Between items picks a comma with or without a space, a semicolon or a pipe. Blank lines are skipped and each item is trimmed.

Quotes wraps every item in single or double quotes, and Wrap in adds brackets round the whole list. The page opens set up for an SQL IN clause: single quotes and round brackets.

Swap to go the other way. A list like "x, y", z comes back as two items, not three, because a comma inside quotes belongs to the item.

Put O'Brien in single quotes without thinking and you get 'O'Brien'. To a database that's the string O, followed by a syntax error. If the list came from user input, it's also the shape of an SQL injection.

There are two fixes, and which one is right depends on where the list is going. SQL and CSV double the quote, so O'Brien becomes 'O''Brien'. RFC 4180, the 2005 description of the CSV format, spells it out for double quotes: a quote inside a field "must be escaped by preceding it with another double quote". JavaScript, Python and most code use a backslash instead, 'O\'Brien'.

Quote inside an item picks between them. When we tried five popular comma-separator tools in September 2026, none escaped quotes at all.

Sort the column first with the alphabetizer if the order matters. For structured data rather than a single list, JSON to CSV handles every column at once, with the same quoting rules.