Split Text Into Lines

How the Split Lines works

Split text into lines: what it does and why

Splitting is the inverse of joining, and it is the first step of almost every list clean-up: you cannot sort, deduplicate or count items until each one is on its own line. This tool exists so that step never needs a spreadsheet or a scripting language.

Delimiters. The presets cover the usual suspects. Comma for CSV-style values, Space for words and command-line arguments, Semicolon for European CSV and PATH-style lists, Pipe for log formats and regex alternations, Tab for a spreadsheet row pasted in. Custom text splits on whatever string you type — a multi-character separator like -> or , works just as well as a single character. Note that Space splits on any run of whitespace, so double spaces do not produce empty items.

Regex. For anything irregular, choose Regex and type a pattern in the custom box. Splitting on [,;]\s* handles a list where some items are separated by commas and others by semicolons. Splitting on \d+\. breaks up a numbered list. If the pattern is invalid the output shows the error instead of silently doing nothing, so you can see what to fix.

Every N characters. Fixed-width data — hex strings, base64, serial numbers, columns from a mainframe report — has no delimiter at all. Set Every N characters and the number of characters and the text is chopped into equal chunks, with the final chunk holding whatever is left. Line breaks in the input are removed first so wrapped hex dumps come out clean.

Empty pieces. Two delimiters in a row produce an empty item. By default those are dropped, which is what you want for a messy hand-typed list. Keep them when the position matters, such as a CSV row where an empty cell is real data.

Trimming. Each piece is trimmed of surrounding whitespace, so a, b, c splits cleanly into a, b, c rather than leaving leading spaces on the last two. Turn trimming off when the whitespace is part of the data.

What happens to existing line breaks. For the delimiter modes, existing newlines are kept as separators too, so pasting a multi-line CSV produces every cell on its own line. If you only want to split within lines, join them first with a distinct separator and split on that.

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