Troubleshooting Text Grep

Start here

If Text Grep returns unexpected results, work through the symptoms below before assuming the file is unrecoverable. Most issues are encoding, delimiter, or header mismatches — not corrupt data.

Common symptoms and fixes

• Unexpected or empty result: Verify input format, options, and that the file is not password-protected or empty.
• Tool seems slow on large files: Try a sample first; very large files may hit browser memory limits — split then process.
• Output differs from Excel: Excel applies locale-specific parsing; trust structural validation over visual match.

Re-run after each fix. Client-side processing makes iteration fast.

Using Health Score for diagnosis

Sort issues by severity — fix blocking errors before warnings. A score jump from C to A usually means one systematic fix (encoding, header rename, date format), not hundreds of row edits.

When to escalate

If the file fails every tool in Developer Tools, inspect raw bytes (hex editor or `file` command) for wrong encoding labels. Re-export from the source system with explicit UTF-8 CSV settings.

For vendor files, send them the validation report — specific row and column errors speed up their fix cycle.