🧮 Text Column Aligner

Paste delimiter-separated lines and get them realigned into neat monospace columns — like column -t, right in your browser.

Delimited Text

Delimiter

How the widths are worked out

Each line is split on the delimiter, every cell is trimmed of its surrounding spaces, and each column is padded to the width of its longest cell plus a two-space gutter - the same rule the Unix column -t uses:

name,age,city          name       age  city
Alice,30,Boston   ->   Alice      30   Boston
Bob,25,Seattle         Bob        25   Seattle
Charlotte,41,Denver    Charlotte  41   Denver

The first column is nine characters wide because Charlotte is nine, and the gutter adds two more, so age starts at column 12. The final column is never padded, which keeps the output free of trailing whitespace when you paste it into a code comment or a README.

What the aligner does to your rows

Blank lines are dropped, not preserved. A file broken into groups by empty lines comes back as one solid block.
Ragged rows are padded out. The column count is taken from the longest row, and a row with fewer cells simply gets empty ones on the right.
There is no CSV quoting. The delimiter is a plain character split, so "Smith, John",42 becomes three cells and pushes that row out of step. Change the delimiter to a pipe or semicolon that your data does not contain.
Everything is left aligned, numbers included. Decimal points in a price column will not line up.

Width is counted in characters, not in printed width, so a table holding CJK or emoji can still look crooked in a terminal where those glyphs take two cells each.

Frequently asked questions

How do I line up columns in a plain text file?

Paste the rows and pick the character that separates them. The result only looks aligned in a fixed-width font - in Arial the space is narrower than the letters and the columns collapse again.

Can I use a tab as the delimiter?

Yes. Choose Tab from the list, which is what you want for anything copied out of a spreadsheet, since Excel and Google Sheets put tabs between cells on the clipboard.

Why did two of my columns merge into one?

The row had fewer delimiters than the others, usually because a value already contained the delimiter or a field was left empty without its separator. The aligner pads from the left, so one missing separator shifts the whole row.