Line breaks inside cells

• Someone pressed the key combination that starts a new line within a spreadsheet cell.
• A multi-line form field, such as an address or a comment, was exported as it was typed.
• Text was pasted from an email or a document with its paragraph breaks.

• A tool that reads the file one line at a time splits the record in two, and both halves have the wrong number of columns.
• Row counts disagree between tools, depending on whether each one honors quoted line breaks.
• Every column after the break shifts, so values land under the wrong headers.

• Compare the number of lines in the file with the number of records it should hold.
• Look for rows with too few columns, followed by a row that starts mid-sentence.
• Search text columns for line break characters directly.

• Read the file with a parser that respects quoted fields, so a break inside quotes stays inside its cell.
• Replace line breaks within a cell with a visible separator such as a comma and a space, if the lines belong together.
• If the lines are really separate facts, such as street and unit, split them into columns instead.
• Repair a file that has already been split by rejoining the broken rows, and check the column count afterward.

• Stray whitespace and invisible charactersTwo values look identical on screen but differ by a trailing space, a non-breaking space, or a hidden character.
• Multiple values in one cellA single cell holds a list, or two different facts, joined by a comma, slash, or line break.
• Addresses written many waysThe same place is written with different abbreviations, word order, capitalization, and levels of detail.

TermsCSV, Delimiter, Parsing, Whitespace