Why delimiter detection fails
Counting punctuation is not enough. A notes field can contain many commas inside quotes, while the real separator is a semicolon. Locale settings also make semicolon-separated files common where commas are decimal marks.
Safe repair steps
- Inspect several complete rows, not only the header.
- Ignore candidate separators that occur inside quoted fields.
- Prefer the delimiter that produces a consistent column count.
- Preserve embedded line breaks and escaped quotes.
- Export to a known delimiter and verify the row width.
Private, deterministic repair
The free tool parses the file in your browser and never sends its contents to the server. It diagnoses comma, semicolon, tab, and pipe formats, then exports normalized comma-separated UTF-8 CSV plus a JSON repair report.