name , role , city Ada Lovelace, Engineer , London Linus , Maintainer, Helsinki Grace Hopper, Admiral , New York
About CSV Formatter & Aligner — Make CSV/TSV Readable
Raw CSV exports are painful to read: columns of different lengths zig-zag down the screen and nothing lines up. This CSV aligner pads every column to the width of its widest cell, turning delimited data into a clean, scannable table you can eyeball in any monospace font — while keeping the output valid CSV.
It parses to RFC 4180, so quoted fields containing commas, embedded quotes, and newlines are handled correctly rather than naively split. Pick your delimiter (comma, tab, or semicolon) to align CSV or TSV, then hit Compact to strip the padding back to plain, minimal CSV when you are ready to save.
Everything runs locally in your browser — paste a database dump or an export with sensitive rows and nothing is ever uploaded.
Features
- Aligns each column to its widest cell for a readable table
- RFC 4180 parsing — quoted fields, embedded commas, quotes, and newlines
- Selectable delimiter: comma, tab (TSV), or semicolon
- Compact mode strips the padding back to plain CSV; fully offline
How to use
- Paste your CSV or TSV into the input pane.
- Choose the delimiter (Comma, Tab, or Semicolon) that matches your data.
- Press Align to pad the columns into a table, or Compact to strip padding.
- Copy the result from the output pane.
Frequently asked questions
Is the aligned output still valid CSV?
Yes. Padding is added as spaces between fields, and any field that needs quoting (because it contains the delimiter, a quote, or a newline) is quoted. Most parsers ignore the surrounding spaces; use Compact first if you need strictly minimal CSV.
Does it handle quoted fields with commas inside?
Yes. The parser follows RFC 4180, so a field like "Smith, John" is treated as a single value, embedded "" escaped quotes are preserved, and newlines inside quotes do not break rows.
How do I align a TSV (tab-separated) file?
Set the delimiter to Tab. The tool then aligns on tabs instead of commas, which is ideal for spreadsheet pastes and TSV exports.
What does Compact do?
Compact reverses Align: it trims the alignment whitespace from each field and re-joins with a bare delimiter, giving you tidy, minimal CSV again. Aligning and then compacting returns the original data.
Is my data uploaded anywhere?
No. All parsing and alignment happens in your browser. Nothing you paste leaves your device, so it is safe for confidential exports.
Related tools
Everything runs locally in your browser — your input is never uploaded.