Split text at commas, pipes or a pattern — one item per line

How to use the text splitter

1. Paste your text into Your text.
2. Choose Split on: comma, semicolon, pipe, tab, spaces, full stop, Custom text or Regular expression.
3. For the last two, type the delimiter or pattern in Custom delimiter.
4. Keep Trim each item and Drop empty items ticked for a clean list. The result appears under One item per line as you type.

What it does and when to use it

Data often arrives squeezed into one line: tags in a CMS field, a list of email recipients, values copied from a URL, a row of a CSV file. The splitter turns that line into a vertical list you can sort, count, de-duplicate or paste into a spreadsheet column.

Pick the option that matches how the data is glued together:

• Comma , or Semicolon ; for lists from forms and exports.
• Pipe | or Tab for log lines and data copied from a table.
• Spaces to put every word on its own line.
• Full stop . for quick splits of short phrases. For real prose, the sentence splitter is better because it understands abbreviations and decimals.
• Custom text for any multi-character delimiter, such as “ - “ or “::”.
• Regular expression when the separator varies.

After splitting, the text sorter and remove duplicates tools work well on the list.

How it works

The tool cuts the text at every match of the chosen separator. Custom text is matched exactly as typed, with \n and \t read as a line break and a tab. Regular expressions use JavaScript syntax with Unicode mode on. The Spaces option treats any run of whitespace as one break. Then each piece is trimmed (if ticked), empty pieces are dropped (if ticked), and the pieces are joined with line breaks. Nothing leaves your browser.

Worked examples

These outputs come from the tool’s own function.

A tag list. apple, banana, cherry, date with the default comma setting gives four lines: apple, banana, cherry, date. Trimming removed the space after each comma.

A multi-character delimiter. step one - step two - step three with Custom text - gives step one, step two, step three. The hyphen inside a word would be left alone because only space-hyphen-space matches.

Messy units. 10 kg, 20kg , 35 kg with the regular expression \s*kg\s*,?\s* gives 10, 20 and 35, one per line. The pattern removes the unit, the comma and any spacing in one step.

Limits and tips

• The comma option does not understand quoted CSV fields. For a field like "Lee, Sam", use the column extractor, which respects quotes.
• Splitting on a full stop also splits decimals such as 2.5.
• If Custom text is left empty, the tool falls back to splitting on commas.