CSV Viewer

CSV as a table you can sort

Raw CSV is a stream of commas and newlines that is hard to read past a few rows. A viewer parses it into a real table with a header row and sortable columns, so you can click a column to order by it and actually see your data. No spreadsheet app, no import step, just paste and read.

The quoting rules that trip parsers

CSV looks trivial until a field contains a comma. The rule: wrap such a field in double quotes. A field with a quote inside doubles it. And a field can even contain a newline if it is quoted, which breaks any naive split-on-newline approach. A correct viewer honors all three, so an address with a comma stays in one cell.

Example

name,note
Ada,"Hello, world"
Lin,"Line one
Line two"

This is two data rows. The first note holds a comma, the second holds a newline, both protected by the surrounding quotes rather than ending the field.

Sorting is display, not data

Clicking a column reorders what you see, it does not change the underlying rows or their original order. Watch for numeric columns sorted as text, where 10 lands before 2; a good viewer detects numbers and sorts them numerically. Mixed columns (numbers and blanks) are where sort order gets ambiguous.

FAQ

What if my file uses semicolons? Some locales export with ; as the separator because the comma is a decimal mark. The viewer needs to detect or let you set the delimiter.

Is the first row always a header? By convention yes, but CSV does not mark it. If your data has no header, the first row of values will be misread as column names.