CSV to TXT
Or paste subtitle text
What this conversion changes
2 things are dropped or need a decision
- Timing
the whole timeline (the output format records no timings at all)
- Line breaks
line breaks (multi-line cues will be joined into one line)
This list comes from the capability matrix for these two formats, not from the particular file you loaded. A specific file may lose more if it uses features the format allows but the matrix does not model.
This page converts CSV to TXT. Drop a file in — or paste the text — and you get the TXT version back. The conversion runs entirely in your browser, so nothing is uploaded and no account is needed.
These two formats do not store the same things, and the difference is not cosmetic: timing and line breaks have nowhere to go in TXT. The list above comes from what the two formats can each express rather than from your file, so it is the same answer before you load anything.
One file is fine, and so is a whole season: the queue works through them in order and the results come down together as a single ZIP.
Examples
A typical CSV file, converted to TXT
Input
start,end,text
00:00:01.000,00:00:03.500,The quick brown fox.
00:00:04.000,00:00:06.250,"Jumps over, the lazy dog."
00:00:07.000,00:00:09.000,"Two lines here.
And a second one."
Output
The quick brown fox.
Jumps over, the lazy dog.
Two lines here.
And a second one.
Dropped in this output: timing and line breaks. Everything else matches line for line.
The same conversion on an awkward input
Input
id,start,end,note,text
1,00:00:01,000,00:00:04,000,cue one,"Hello there, friend."
2,00:00:05.000,00:00:07.000,cue two,Second line.
bad,notatime,00:00:09.000,cue three,Unreadable start.
4,00:00:10.000,00:00:09.000,cue four,End before start.
5,00:00:12.000,00:00:14.000,cue five,Unquoted comma in text, right here.
Output
Hello there, friend.
Second line.
End before start.
Unquoted comma in text, right here.
This is the kind of damage real files have — mixed line endings, stray whitespace, fields left empty. Compare it with the tidy example above to see what the parser forgives.
Frequently asked questions
Where did the CSV timecodes go?
TXT has none to give: a text export is words, not moments. The order of the CSV lines is kept, so the fortieth line of your file is the fortieth line here, but nothing in the output says when any of it appears on screen.
What happens to a two-line CSV cue in TXT?
Both lines are written, one under the other, but the file stops saying they belong together: TXT cannot group lines into one cue, so reading the result back would give two subtitles where your CSV file had one. That matters if a translation pass or a retiming tool is going to read the file afterwards.
What does the output look like when CSV becomes TXT?
Like TXT: no cue numbers and no timecodes — one line of text per line of subtitle. Every CSV cue becomes one TXT cue, in the same order, with the same text.
Do CSV cues keep their order in the TXT output?
Yes, and they are sorted by start time on the way — earliest first, which is how every format here expects them and how players read them. If your CSV file listed its cues out of sequence, the TXT output puts them back in order; that is a change to the file's structure rather than its content, and it is deliberate.
Can I convert the TXT back to CSV?
Yes, and it has its own list: converting TXT to CSV drops timing. That list is different from the one above because the two formats keep different things.
Does the TXT output keep the CSV file's encoding?
No — the output is UTF-8, with Unix line endings and no byte-order mark, whatever the CSV file used. A file that arrives in UTF-16, or in a Windows single-byte encoding, is decoded on the way in (the result panel says so when that happens); what comes out is always the same UTF-8 TXT.