CSV Column Extractor
A focused cut from a wide CSV without opening a spreadsheet. Parses RFC 4180–style CSV (quoted fields with embedded delimiters and escaped quotes), with selectable tab/semicolon/pipe delimiters. Pick columns by header name or index, optionally dedupe and sort, and emit them in the format that matches the next step — newline-per-row for piping into another tool, or a `(...)` IN-clause to drop into a SQL editor.
ana@x.com bae@y.com cai@z.com
Parsing is RFC 4180 — quoted fields can contain delimiters and newlines, doubled quotes decode to a single quote.
How to use
- Paste your CSV/TSV and confirm the header toggle matches your data.
- Click the column chips to choose which to keep — order in the output follows the column order.
- Pick the output format (plain, CSV, quoted list, SQL IN) and copy.
Frequently asked questions
- Does it handle quoted fields and escaped quotes?
- Yes. Fields wrapped in double quotes are unquoted, embedded delimiters and newlines are preserved, and `""` is treated as a literal double quote per RFC 4180.
- Why is there a SQL IN-clause option?
- When you've got a list of IDs in a CSV and you need to write `WHERE id IN (...)`, this saves you the manual quoting. The format escapes single quotes too.
- The IN-clause quotes numbers. Is that a problem?
- It can be. Quoting a numeric literal asks the database to compare a string with a number, and engines disagree about what happens next: some convert silently, some raise an error, and some stop using the index on that column, which turns a fast lookup into a full scan. Check the column's type and drop the quotes when it is numeric.
- Why does dedupe return fewer rows than I expected?
- Values are compared exactly, so whitespace, letter case and invisible characters all count. Two entries that look identical but differ by a trailing space stay separate — which is common in data pasted out of a spreadsheet or a web page. Trim the source column before extracting when the input came from either.
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