# Text to Columns

Text to columns offers the ability to split one column into many based on characters that appear in that column.

Any column can be split on a number of different characters combinations:

| Option           | Description                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                      |
| ---------------- | ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| Common Delimiter | <p>Split on commonly-used characters:</p><ul><li>Tab</li><li>Comma</li><li>Semicolon</li><li>Space</li><li>Pipe</li></ul>                                                                                                                                        |
| Custom Delimiter | <p>Enter your own <strong>custom delimiter</strong> to split on or</p><p>Enter a <a href="https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/JavaScript/Guide/Regular_Expressions/Cheatsheet"><strong>regex</strong></a> string to identify characters to split on</p> |

You also have the option to identify whether consecutive delimiters should be treated as one, or if your data has enclosing quotes.&#x20;

{% hint style="warning" %}
Note that regex and multi-character custom delimiters cannot be used in conjunction with the option to treat consecutive delimiters as one
{% endhint %}

### Example

Let's say we have a list of email addresses that we want to split into multiple columns:

{% embed url="<https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/5Rt3U/1/>" %}

We want to split on the `.` inside the emails, so we select the **Custom** delimiter and enter `.`. We get the following result:

{% embed url="<https://datawrapper.dwcdn.net/VbvRi/2/>" %}

Note that some emails have multiple periods inside them -- the number of resulting columns equals the number of delimiters identified plus one.


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