From a spreadsheet column to one line
Copying a column from any spreadsheet puts one value per line on your clipboard — which is exactly the input this tool wants. Paste, pick a delimiter, and the column becomes a single line: apple, banana, cherry. The three cleanup toggles handle what real pasted columns contain: trim strips the stray spaces that ride along with cell values, skip empties drops the blank rows a selection usually includes at the end, and dedupe removes repeats while keeping first-occurrence order. The reverse direction — one delimited line back into a column — is the same tool with the radio flipped, and it's how you get a comma list back into a spreadsheet as rows.
The hidden real use case: SQL IN clauses
Half the traffic to tools like this is someone with a column of IDs and a query to write. The SQL IN (…) preset sets everything at once: comma delimiter, single-quote wrapping, empties skipped — producing ('a','b','c') with the parentheses included, ready to paste after WHERE id IN. Duplicates are worth removing here too (the toggle), since they bloat the query without changing the result. One honest caution: quoting values this way is for values you trust — your own IDs from your own export. Never build an IN clause by pasting user-supplied strings into a query; that's what parameterized queries are for. And note that single quotes inside a value are doubled automatically (O'Brien → 'O''Brien'), which is the SQL-standard escape.
Which delimiter, when
Comma + space reads best in prose and email. Bare comma is for machine consumers — CSV fields, query parameters, config values — where the space would become part of the data. Semicolons are the de-facto list separator in locales where the comma is the decimal mark, and the safe choice when items themselves contain commas. Pipe survives almost any content and is a common intermediate format for imports. And custom covers everything else — - for readable breadcrumbs, \t-style needs are better served by pasting back into a spreadsheet.
Frequently asked questions
How do I turn a comma-separated list back into lines?
Flip the direction to One line → list. The tool splits on your chosen delimiter (quotes are stripped if you select the matching quote style), applies the same trim/empty/dedupe toggles, and gives you one item per line — which pastes into a spreadsheet as a column.
What happens if my items contain the delimiter?
Joining is unaffected — the item text is kept as-is, so Portland, OR joined with commas produces an ambiguous line. That's a property of delimited text, not the tool; switch to a delimiter the data doesn't contain (semicolon, pipe) or add quote wrapping so consumers can tell items apart. Splitting an ambiguous line can't recover the original grouping — no tool can.
Does dedupe keep the original order?
Yes — first occurrence wins, later repeats are dropped, and nothing is sorted. If you need sorting too, run the list through our Remove Duplicate Lines tool, which has A–Z, Z–A, and numeric sort built in.
Is my list uploaded anywhere?
No — joining, splitting, and deduping all run in your browser tab with no server or network request, and the page works offline once loaded. Paste ID lists from production systems without a second thought.