CSV to JSON Converter

Why a real CSV parser matters

CSV looks simple — split on commas, split on newlines, done — until a field itself contains a comma. The CSV spec's answer is to wrap such a field in double quotes, and to escape any literal quote inside it by doubling it (""). A field can even contain a real newline as long as it's inside quotes. A naive split(",") parser doesn't know any of this: it treats every comma as a column boundary, so a single quoted field like "Smith, John" gets sliced into two columns and every field after it in that row shifts out of alignment — silent corruption, not an error. This tool instead reads the input one character at a time, tracking whether it's currently inside a quoted field, so quoted commas and newlines stay part of the field they belong to.

Worked example

Input:

name,city
"Smith, John","New York"
"O""Brien",Boston

Row one has a comma inside a quoted name — a naive parser would read that as four columns instead of two and wreck the rest of the table. Row two has an escaped "" quote, which must collapse to a single literal ". This tool produces:

[
  {
    "name": "Smith, John",
    "city": "New York"
  },
  {
    "name": "O\"Brien",
    "city": "Boston"
  }
]

— two clean rows, the embedded comma preserved as part of the name, and O""Brien correctly collapsed to a single O"Brien.