CSV ↔ PSV Converter

PSV is CSV with a pipe in place of the comma. It exists for a practical reason: text data is full of commas — addresses, descriptions, decimal values in many locales — and each one forces the field into quotes. Switching the separator to a character that almost never appears in content makes the file far more readable and cuts the chance of an import going wrong.

The page converts both ways, so it serves both for producing the pipe-separated file and for bringing back a PSV received from another system. The reader understands the full CSV rules, so a quoted field containing a comma is read as one value, doubled quotes become a literal quote, and a line break inside a quoted field does not split the record. On output, a field is only quoted when it contains the new separator, a quote or a line break — which in practice leaves almost everything unquoted.

PSV turns up regularly in banking and ERP integrations, and in mainframe exports, where the pipe is a long-standing convention. Keep in mind there is no formal specification for the format: the agreement about quoting and escaping varies from system to system, so confirm with the destination documentation whether it expects quotes in any particular case.