Convert CSV to Textile Online

Paste a CSV table below, edit it if you need to, and get Textile back. The conversion runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded, there is no size limit and there is no signup.

From

From a page

The only part of this site that uses a server. The address is sent to it so the page can be fetched, because a browser is not allowed to fetch someone else's page itself. Your own files are never involved.

Nothing here is uploaded. The parsing happens on this page.

Edit

Paste or upload something above and it will appear here.

ToDataMarkupDocumentsCodeSchemasImages

Header rowDetect numbers

The output will appear here once there is a table to convert.

What CSV is

CSV is a text file where each line is a row and commas separate the fields. There is no type system, no formatting and no second sheet. Every value is text until something downstream decides otherwise.

Almost every database, analytics tool and spreadsheet can read and write it, which is why exports default to it.

What Textile is

Textile marks header cells with |_. and data cells with plain pipes.

Redmine, and older Rails applications.

What changes when you convert CSV to Textile

Reading CSV means deciding three things the file does not state: which character separates fields, how quotes work, and what encoding the bytes are in. Tablizer sniffs the delimiter from the first few lines, handles quoted fields containing commas and newlines, and reads the file as UTF-8.

The header row is written with the |_. marker so it renders as a header.

What carries over from CSV to Textile

One property of the CSV has no home in Textile, and it is worth knowing which before you convert.

A line break inside a cell ends the row in Textile, so line breaks are replaced rather than carried through.

Textile marks its header cells differently from its data cells, so the first row is written with that marker.

The identifier 007 comes out of the Textile as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.

The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a Textile file goes wrong.

The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the Textile.

A worked example

Three rows of staff data, with an identifier that has a leading zero, a value containing a comma, a value containing quotes and one blank cell. Those are the four places formats disagree, so they are the four places to look.

CSV in

id,name,role,started,hours
007,Halima Yusuf,"Analyst, data",2024-03-15,38.5
012,"Jonah ""Jo"" Pryce",Engineer,2025-11-02,
104,Wei Chen,Manager,2023-06-30,40

Textile out

|_. id |_. name |_. role |_. started |_. hours |
| 007 | Halima Yusuf | Analyst, data | 2024-03-15 | 38.5 |
| 012 | Jonah "Jo" Pryce | Engineer | 2025-11-02 |  |
| 104 | Wei Chen | Manager | 2023-06-30 | 40 |

Questions

How do I convert CSV to Textile?

Paste your CSV into the box above or drop the file onto it. Check the table in the grid, then copy or download the Textile from the output panel. It takes one step and the data never leaves your browser.

Why does my CSV open with all the data in one column?

The file uses a delimiter your spreadsheet did not expect. Exports from European locales often use semicolons because the comma is the decimal separator there. Change the delimiter in the export options and the columns split correctly.

One of my cells has a line break in it - what happens?

A line break would end the row in Textile, so it is replaced instead of carried through. The rest of the cell stays where it belongs.

Is there a limit on file size?

No. The work happens on your own machine, so the limit is your machine's memory rather than an upload cap. A file with tens of thousands of rows converts in a second or two.

Is my data uploaded anywhere?

No. The parsing and generating are done by JavaScript running on this page. You can watch the network tab while you convert and see that nothing is sent.