What this checker is for
A CSV can open perfectly in Excel or Google Sheets and still fail in another importer. Spreadsheet software is often forgiving: it can display a file even when a destination system expects a different delimiter, valid UTF-8, unique headers, balanced quotes, or exactly the same number of fields on every row.
This preflight is designed to answer a narrower question before you upload: is the file structurally consistent enough to hand to another system? It does not try to predict every business rule of every destination.
Checks performed
| Encoding | Strictly confirms UTF-8. Non-UTF-8 files require you to identify the source encoding before any conversion. |
| Delimiter | Detects the separator reported by the parser, including comma, semicolon, tab, and pipe. |
| Headers | Finds empty names, duplicate names, and surrounding whitespace. |
| Quotes | Surfaces parser errors caused by missing or malformed quoted fields. |
| Row width | Compares each data row with the number of fields in the header row. |
| Empty rows | Reports internal blank rows that can be removed safely. |
A reproducible example
One short file can contain more than one kind of import risk. Here the third data row has one field too few.
sku,name,price
A-100,Blue Shirt,19.99
A-101,Red Shirt,24.50
A-102,Green ShirtWhat the checker can prove from the file
- The header establishes an expected width of three columns.
- The final row has only two fields, so one business value is missing or a delimiter is absent.
- The checker can identify the row, but it cannot know whether the missing value should be a price, an empty field, or something else.
Return to the source data and determine the intended third field for the affected row.
Do not append a guessed comma, zero, empty price, or copied value just to make the row width match.
Reproduce the behavior
Read the underlying rule
Why the health score is not an approval score
The score summarizes checks performed on this page. A clean structural report does not mean Shopify, a CRM, an ERP, or another platform will accept the file. Those systems can enforce required columns, valid identifiers, allowed values, account-specific relationships, or file-size rules that are not encoded in generic CSV syntax.
Privacy and limits
The file is parsed in your browser with JavaScript and a Web Worker. CSVFixLab does not need to send the selected CSV to an application server for this analysis. Keep your original file and validate any repaired copy in a safe import workflow before using it in production.