How can I convert a .txt file to .csv format without using Excel?

Question

I have a .txt file consisting of very long paragraphs, with a single newline character separating each paragraph. I would like to convert this to a .csv format so that the file effectively has one column holding all the paragrahs, i.e., the first cell in each "row" contains the entire paragraph. However, I cannot use Excel to do this by simply opening the file in Excel and saving it as .csv, because some of my paragraphs are larger than the 10¹⁵ character limit that MS Excel has on a single field.

Solution

Assuming the text is properly escaped (i.e. embedded commas and linefeeds are double-quoted) you can just rename the file to .csv. There is nothing otherwise special about a CSV file format. It is essentially a text file.

There's actually a spec for CSV (you can read here). Note the rules for enclosing fields with double quotes: "Fields containing line breaks (CRLF), double quotes, and commas should be enclosed in double-quotes," and "If double-quotes are used to enclose fields, then a double-quote appearing inside a field must be escaped by preceding it with another double quote."

For example:

"You want to convert text to CSV," she noted.
This line doesn't need quotes (but they don't hurt).

Becomes:

"""You want to convert text to CSV,"" she noted."
"This line doesn't need quotes (but they don't hurt)."

Comments

[user216357]

It's not escaped. I guess I could do a find+replace for all the relevant characters to add the double quotes, though. Thanks.

[Bradd Szonye]

To turn the current text into valid CSV, you can replace every double quote with a pair of double quotes, and then add a double quote to the beginning and end of each line.

[Jamie Hanrahan]

Yes. Notepad++ would be especially good for this.