CSV Viewer
Format and show selected CSV file on display.
| Delimiter |
|
|---|---|
| Use first line as header |
|
| Encoding |
|
| CSV File |
Tips
- CSVs saved by Excel may use Shift-JIS (CP932) encoding, commonly used in Japanese/legacy Excel files. If you see garbled characters, select "Shift JIS".
- Enable "Use first line as header" to display the first row as a table header.
- To view TSV (tab-separated) files, change the delimiter to "Tab".
- File contents are processed entirely in the browser and are never sent to the server. CSVs containing sensitive data can be used safely.
FAQ
Side Note — The Surprising History of CSV: 40 Years Without a Standard
CSV (Comma-Separated Values) looks simple, but for many years there was no official standard specification. The formal RFC, "RFC 4180", was published in 2005 — more than 30 years after CSV came into widespread use. Until then, implementation differences between tools and languages caused issues like "whether to wrap fields in double quotes" and "whether to use CRLF or LF for line endings".
Excel's behavior of saving CSVs in Shift-JIS encoding in Japanese-locale environments has been a classic pain point for engineers for decades. Google Sheets exports in UTF-8, so opening that CSV directly in Excel causes garbled characters. To avoid this, save from Excel as UTF-8 (with BOM), or specify the encoding when importing.
In the world of data science, the vast majority of datasets published on Kaggle (the machine learning competition platform) are in CSV format. Its simplicity and universal compatibility with any programming language is CSV's greatest strength.