Tablora · Library
Read a pipe-delimited record without changing its content
Read text that uses a vertical bar between fields, like code|label, without treating it as a markdown table or trimming spaces around the values.
When a vertical bar separates fields
Database dumps, log exports and some legacy systems use the pipe character | as the field separator because it rarely appears inside data. A record such as A1|Shelf two splits cleanly into two fields even though the label contains a space.
The inspector supports the pipe as an explicit Delimiter. It reads exactly the characters you paste: it does not drop spaces next to a pipe, and it does not know about the layout conventions of markdown tables.
Parsing code|label
- Paste the text into Table text.
- Choose | as the Delimiter, or leave Detect delimiter selected and check that the detected result has the columns you expect.
- Press Calculate and confirm Columns and Rows.
- Inspect a cell with spaces in it to make sure it was not split.
- If any value can itself contain a pipe, it must be quoted in the source, just as a comma would be in CSV.
- Keep the pipe for every row. A file that switches to another separator part-way through shows up under Rows with a different width.
The Shelf two example
The page example is a header code|label and a record A1|Shelf two, with the pipe as the Delimiter. The inspector reports 2 rows and 2 columns, and row 2, column 2 reads Shelf two, with its internal space intact. No value was converted or trimmed.
Had the record been written with spaces around the pipe, the first cell would end with a space and the second would start with one. The inspector keeps those spaces, so decide from the source whether they belong to the data.
A markdown table is a different format
A table copied from a chat, a README or a wiki often looks like pipe-separated text, but it is not the same thing. Its rows usually start and end with a pipe, which produces an empty first and last cell. The spaces that pad each value for alignment are kept as part of the cell. The separator line made of dashes, such as |---|---|, is read as a data row like any other.
If you need to use such a table, clean it in a copy first: remove the outer pipes and the dash row, and decide whether the padding spaces matter. Then inspect it again and check that the cells hold only the text you want.
Exporting the result
Download (CSV) writes the table with commas as the separator and quotes any value that contains a comma, a quote or a line break. If you need pipes in the output, keep your original text; the download is a comma-separated file.
Original synthetic example
- Input
- code|label A1|Shelf two
- Delimiter
- |
- Expected records
- 2
- Columns in the first record
- 2
- Cell to inspect
- Row 2, column 2: Shelf two