Common CSV Import Errors

Ragged Rows

The most frequent CSV import error is inconsistent column counts. When a text field contains a comma that isn't wrapped in double quotes, the parser treats it as a column separator, creating extra fields on that row. Always wrap fields containing commas, quotes, or newlines in double quotes.

Encoding Issues

Import failures with garbled characters (like é instead of é) indicate an encoding mismatch. The file was likely saved as ANSI/Windows-1252 but read as UTF-8. Re-save the file as UTF-8 without BOM in your spreadsheet application or text editor.

Delimiter Problems

European CSV files often use semicolons instead of commas (because comma is the decimal separator). Some systems auto-detect delimiters; others require explicit configuration. Our tools auto-detect the delimiter and report confidence levels.

Data Quality Issues

Beyond structural errors, data quality issues cause silent import problems: duplicate rows create double entries, missing values in required fields cause constraint violations, and mixed data types in a column (numbers and text) cause type conversion errors.

Run a CSV Health Score analysis to identify all data quality issues at once, then use the CSV Cleaner to fix them.