Join Lines

How to join lines

Paste your list into Your lines, one item per line, or press Load example. The joined text appears next to it and updates as you type. Pick a separator with the quick buttons or type your own: \t is a tab, \n a new line and \\ a backslash. Copy the result or download it as a .txt file. Everything runs in your browser, so nothing you paste is uploaded.

• Wrap each item puts double quotes, single quotes, backticks or your own text around every item. Escape quotes inside items stops those quotes from breaking the result.
• Start with and End with add text around the result, such as brackets.
• Join every N lines makes one output line from every N input lines instead of one line from everything.
• Clean-up trims spaces, skips empty lines and removes duplicates before joining.

Turn a column into a comma-separated list

When you copy a column from Excel, Google Sheets or a database client, each cell arrives as its own line. Paste it here and the default settings give you value1, value2, value3. Trimming removes the stray spaces that spreadsheet cells often carry, and skipping empty lines drops blank cells, so you don't get doubled commas. Choose Comma instead of Comma and space when the list goes into a URL parameter, a config file or a tag field that expects no spaces.

Build SQL IN lists and JSON arrays safely

A quote inside an item ends the string early. Wrap O'Brien in single quotes without escaping and you get 'O'Brien': SQL reads the string 'O' followed by stray text, and the query fails. The SQL IN list preset doubles single quotes, which is the standard SQL escape:

SELECT * FROM users WHERE last_name IN ('O''Brien', 'Smith');

Use this for queries you run by hand. In application code, pass values as query parameters instead of building SQL strings. Two database quirks are worth knowing. MySQL also treats a backslash as an escape character by default, so items that contain backslashes need them doubled. Oracle accepts at most 1,000 values in one IN list: set Join every N lines to 1000 and Add start and end to each output line, then combine the lists with OR.

The JSON array preset encodes every item with JSON.stringify, which escapes double quotes, backslashes and control characters such as tabs, so the result always parses. Hand-made quoting usually misses the backslash: C:\temp has to be written "C:\\temp". Every item becomes a string, so 42 turns into "42". For an array of numbers, choose None and Comma, and start and end with [ and ].

The CSV row preset follows RFC 4180: an item is quoted only when it contains a comma, a double quote or a line break (or your separator, if you changed it), and quotes inside it are doubled.

Join lines in pairs or groups

Some exports put related values on consecutive lines, such as a label and then its value, or a keyword and then its search volume. Set Join every N lines to 2 to rebuild the pairs: lines 1 and 2 become the first output line, lines 3 and 4 the second, and so on. If the count doesn't divide evenly, the last line holds what is left over. Empty lines are skipped before grouping, so a stray blank line doesn't shift every pair after it. Turn off Skip empty lines if blank lines are part of the data.

Examples

Join lines in Excel, Google Sheets or the terminal

• Excel (2019 or later, and Microsoft 365): =TEXTJOIN(", ", TRUE, A2:A100). The TRUE skips empty cells. If the result is longer than 32,767 characters, the most a cell can hold, TEXTJOIN returns #VALUE!.
• Google Sheets: the same TEXTJOIN formula works. =JOIN(", ", A2:A100) is shorter but has no option to skip empty cells.
• Command line: paste -sd, file.txt joins every line of the file with commas. -s merges the lines of each file into one line and -d sets the delimiter. The delimiter list is used one character at a time, so -d ', ' alternates a comma and a space instead of putting both between items. paste -d, - - < file.txt joins lines in pairs, and tr '\n' ',' works too but leaves a comma at the end.

Limits and edge cases

• Lines can end in \n, \r\n or \r. One line break at the end of the input doesn't create an empty item.
• Remove duplicates keeps the first copy and is case-sensitive, so Apple and apple both stay.
• The page handles 100,000 lines without trouble. Above about 2 million characters, live updates pause and you press Join lines to update the result.
• To go the other way and break a joined list back into lines, use Split Text by Delimiter. To add text to every line without joining them, use Add Prefix & Suffix.