Column Extractor
Paste a CSV export, a tab-separated table or any delimited text, choose the columns you want by number or header name, and get them back in the order you choose — renamed, deduplicated and sorted if you like, with any delimiter. Quoted fields with commas and line breaks inside are read correctly, and nothing leaves your browser.
Extracted columns
Paste some delimited text above to pick columns from it.
How to Use the Column Extractor
- Paste your data. CSV, TSV, semicolon- or pipe-separated text, columns separated by spaces, or a fixed-width table. The format is detected automatically; change it if the line under the settings shows the wrong number of columns.
- Pick the columns. Select them from the list of columns found, or type them in the order you want: numbers (
3), ranges (2-4) or header names (Email). - Clean up the rows. Trim spaces, skip empty rows, remove duplicates, and sort by any output column — numbers sort as numbers, so 9 comes before 10.
- Choose the output and copy it. Comma, tab (for pasting into a spreadsheet), semicolon, pipe, space or a delimiter of your own, with or without the header row.
Choosing Columns
| You type | You get |
|---|---|
3 | Column 3 |
3, 1 | Column 3, then column 1 — in any order you like |
2-4 | Columns 2, 3 and 4 |
4-2 | Columns 4, 3 and 2, reversed |
3- | Column 3 through the last column |
Email | The column headed Email, matched regardless of case |
"Last, First" | A column whose header contains a comma, in quotation marks |
*, or nothing at all | Every column — useful when you only want to change the delimiter |
Numbers always mean positions, counting from 1, so a column headed 2024 is chosen by typing "2024" in quotation marks. You can list a column twice, and anything the extractor cannot match is shown in red rather than silently dropped.
How the Input Is Read
CSV has no single official grammar, but RFC 4180 describes what most programs write: fields separated by commas, rows by line breaks, and any field that contains a comma, a quotation mark or a line break wrapped in double quotation marks, with quotation marks inside it doubled. The extractor follows those rules for comma, tab, semicolon, pipe and custom delimiters — a custom delimiter can be several characters long, such as | . It strips the byte-order mark that Excel puts at the start of UTF-8 CSV files, accepts Windows, Unix and old Mac line endings, and repairs common damage — a quotation mark that is never closed, or text after a closing one — telling you when it had to.
Spaces and tabs splits each line on runs of whitespace, which suits command-line output and simple tables but breaks any value that contains a space. Fixed-width columns splits at character positions instead: the extractor finds the positions that are blank in every row, or you type the start positions yourself, so Ada Lovelace stays in one cell.
Worked Example
Choose Try a sample. The data is a short student survey whose values include commas and quotation marks inside quoted fields. The sample column list, Student, Hours per week, Country, picks three columns by name and puts them in a new order:
Output (comma-separated)
Student,Hours per week,Country Amara,12,Kenya Ben,8,Canada Chloé,15,France Diego,10,Mexico Elif,12,Canada
Rename Hours per week to Hours, sort by it from Z to A, 9 to 0, and switch the output to tab, and the result pastes into a spreadsheet as three columns with the busiest students first: Chloé (15), Amara and Elif (12 each, in their original order), Diego (10) and Ben (8). Choose Study spot on its own with duplicates removed and you get the four distinct places, with the two that contain a comma or quotation marks kept in CSV quoting — or set Quote values to Never for a plain list.
To see a whole table at once, use the CSV to Table Converter; to turn rows into JSON objects, use the CSV to JSON Converter. The Column Extractor does the job of the Unix cut command, or of deleting columns in a spreadsheet, without opening one.
Frequently Asked Questions
- How do I extract one column from a CSV file?
- Paste the file's contents, then select the column in the list of columns found or type its number or header name. To get a plain list, one value per line, untick Include the header row in the output and set Quote values to Never.
- How do I remove columns from a CSV?
- List the columns you want to keep rather than the ones to remove — for example
1-3, 5keeps everything except column 4 in a five-column file. The output keeps standard CSV quoting, so it opens cleanly in Excel or Google Sheets. - Can I reorder or rename columns?
- Yes. The order you list the columns in is the order of the output, and Rename columns lets you give any output column a new header without changing the data.
- Why are my columns shifted or split in the wrong places?
- Usually the delimiter was guessed wrongly, or a value contains the delimiter without quotation marks around it. Check the line that reports the format, rows and columns, and choose the format yourself if it is wrong. European CSV files often use semicolons because the comma is the decimal mark.
- How do I paste the result into Excel or Google Sheets?
- Set the output delimiter to Tab, copy, and paste into the first cell: each value lands in its own cell. Comma-separated output also works if you download it as a .csv file and open that.
- Is my data uploaded anywhere?
- No. Parsing, extracting and sorting all happen in your browser; the data is never sent to a server or stored.