Line breaks inside a CSV cell: fix split rows

Your product list looks fine in the file, but after you open or import it, one product shows up as two rows. The second row is often half empty, or its values sit in the wrong columns.

Possible cause. A cell may contain a line break, for example inside a long description. A quote character inside a cell may also confuse how the file is read. Either one can make a single row look like two.

In the synthetic example below, the A100 description has a line break after "shirt". Inside quotes that is valid CSV, so a careful reader keeps A100 as one row; a program that does not handle line breaks inside quotes splits it into two rows. Without the quotes, every reader splits it.

Fix it in a table editor. 1. Open the file and find the rows that look split or shifted. 2. Click the cell where the text breaks onto a new line. 3. Delete the line break and type a space instead, so the text sits on one line. 4. Look for quotes inside cells. Remove a stray quote, or make sure every opening quote has a closing one. 5. Check that each product is on one row again, then save the file as CSV.

Recheck. Open the saved file again and scroll through the rows. Count them: the number should match your product count. Then run the free CSV check. It reads a line break inside quotes as part of one row, stops with a message if a quote is never closed, and when a line break has no quotes around it, reports the half-empty second row it creates, for example an empty title (name) cell or a price that is not a number. Fix anything it lists, and recheck once more.

For the full routine, see our published post titled "Check, fix, recheck: a product CSV before you use it".