Anyone who works with lists eventually hits the same wall. A client sends 400 keywords as one keyword per line, but the tool you need to paste them into wants them comma-separated. Or a database export arrives pipe-delimited and your spreadsheet expects tabs. Reformatting by hand is possible for ten items. For four hundred, it is an afternoon gone and a near-certainty that you will miss one.
The Text Separator does that conversion in a single step. You paste text in one format, tell it what currently separates the items and what should separate them instead, and it rebuilds the list. Line breaks to commas, commas to tabs, semicolons to pipes, or any custom character you type in yourself.
What counts as a separator
A separator is simply the character that marks where one item ends and the next begins. The common ones are the new line, the comma, the tab, the semicolon and the pipe. Which one you need depends entirely on where the text is going. CSV files use commas. Spreadsheet paste buffers use tabs. Many APIs accept pipe-delimited strings. Ad platforms and keyword tools usually want one item per line.
The tool handles the awkward cases too. If your source uses something unusual - a double colon, a caret, a word like "and" - type it into the custom field and it will be used exactly as written.
The cleanup options matter more than the split
Splitting text is the easy part. Real lists are messy, and three options here do most of the useful work.
Trim spaces removes leading and trailing whitespace from every item. This is the one you almost always want. A list written as red, green, blue splits into red, green and blue - the last two carrying a space that will break an exact-match lookup later without ever being visible on screen.
Remove empty items discards the blanks left behind by double line breaks or a trailing comma at the end of a list. Without it you end up with empty cells in your spreadsheet and empty strings in your data.
Remove duplicates keeps the first occurrence of each item and drops the rest, preserving your original order rather than sorting it. For keyword lists merged from two or three sources, this alone can cut the row count by a fifth.
There is also wrap items in quotes, which is narrower but occasionally indispensable: it turns a plain list into one you can paste directly into a SQL IN clause or a JavaScript array without hand-editing every entry.
Everything runs in your browser
The conversion happens in JavaScript on your own machine. Nothing is uploaded, nothing is stored, and no request leaves your computer. That matters when the list you are reformatting is a customer export or an internal product catalogue - the kind of data that should not be pasted into a random web form. Close the tab and it is gone.
The counters below the buttons show how many items went in and how many came out. If those two numbers differ and you did not ask for duplicates or blanks to be removed, your source data had something in it worth investigating.