Join Text

Text rarely arrives in the shape you need. Spreadsheets emit comma-separated rows, your code wants one value per line, and pasted lists carry invisible trailing spaces. This join and split tool converts between a single delimited string and a list of lines in one step. Everything runs locally in your browser, so pasted data does not leave the page.

How to Use

1. Paste your text into the input box.
2. Choose join (lines into one string) or split (one string into lines).
3. Pick a preset delimiter (comma, space, newline, tab, semicolon, pipe, colon) or select Custom and type your own, including multi-character strings.
4. Optionally enable Trim to strip leading and trailing whitespace from each element, and Remove empty to drop blank items.
5. Copy the result with the copy button, or press Swap to reverse the direction.

Worked Examples

Joining lines. Input with three lines apple, banana, cherry and the comma preset produces apple,banana,cherry. The element count reads 3.

Splitting with cleanup. Input red, green,blue , with the comma preset, Trim on, and Remove empty on. The string splits into four pieces: red, green, blue , and an empty piece after the trailing comma. Trim fixes the two padded values, Remove empty drops the blank, and the output is three lines: red, green, blue. The counter reports 3 elements and 1 empty item removed.

Splitting without cleanup. The same input with both options off yields red, green, and blue with their leading spaces intact, plus a blank line, because the raw pieces are written straight back out.

What Happens to Whitespace and Empty Items

Both directions run the same cleanup pipeline. Trim is applied to every element first; Remove empty then filters out anything whose length is zero. Order matters: a field containing only spaces is not empty until Trim runs, so enabling both is what clears whitespace-only values. In join mode the input is divided on the line-feed character; in split mode the delimiter is escaped and used to divide the text. The delimiter itself is discarded during a split, so if you need to reconstruct the original string exactly, use Swap to rejoin with the same delimiter.

Choosing the Right Delimiter

Delimiter	Good for	Watch out for
Comma	CSV-style rows, quick arrays	Values that contain commas
Tab	Spreadsheet paste, TSV exports	Editors that convert tabs to spaces
Pipe	Text where commas are common	Markdown table syntax
Semicolon	European CSV files	Mixed with commas in one file
Newline	Restoring a list, joining one-value-per-line output	Joining makes the output multi-line
Space	Turning a sentence into words	Quoted phrases lose their grouping

A custom delimiter is helpful when your data uses something unusual such as ::, ||, or a word like AND. Because custom input is matched literally, it can include characters that would otherwise have special meaning.

Practical Patterns

Building a SQL IN list from a column. Copy the values from a spreadsheet, split on the newline or comma preset with Trim and Remove empty enabled, then swap to join on the same delimiter. You end up with a tight value list, though you still need to add quotes and parentheses around it yourself.

Turning a sentence into words. Split on the space preset with Remove empty on. Punctuation stays attached to each word, so follow with a cleaning step if you need bare words.

Reformatting a list between tools. YAML accepts a comma-separated flow sequence while a shell script often wants one value per line. Split on comma, copy the lines, and paste them into the target file.

Checking a count before you commit. The input and output counters show how many items the tool actually saw. If a join produces more elements than expected, the input usually contains more line breaks than you realized, which is common when pasting from a rich-text editor.

Common Mistakes

Splitting a CSV line that uses quotes. Delimiters inside quoted fields are still treated as separators, so the column count comes out too high. Use a CSV parser when quoting is involved.

Assuming join adds quotes or escaping. It inserts the delimiter only. Building a SQL IN list or a JSON array from the output means adding quotes or brackets yourself.

Leaving Trim off with pasted data. Spaces that look harmless break exact-match lookups and cause duplicate-looking list entries.

Choosing a delimiter that appears in the values. If a field can contain a comma, split on a pipe or tab instead. The safest delimiter is one that appears nowhere in the data.

Forgetting that split and join are inverse only when the cleanup options match. Splitting a string that contains a trailing delimiter and rejoining it will drop the empty final element if Remove empty is on.

Limits and Edge Cases

The delimiter is always literal, never a regular expression, so patterns and character classes cannot be used to split. Multi-character delimiters work, but overlapping ones do not. Empty input splits into a single empty element before cleanup; with Remove empty on it becomes zero lines. Text pasted from Windows keeps carriage returns unless Trim is enabled. Neither mode sorts, deduplicates, or modifies case, so pair this tool with sorting or deduplication when a list needs more than reformatting.

Related Tools

• Remove Duplicates
• Sort Text Lines
• Text to Slug
• CSV to JSON
• JSON Formatter