Text Splitter

How to split text

1. Paste your text in the box, open a plain-text file with Open file, or press Example to try the sample.
2. Pick a mode in Split by: Characters (keeps words whole), Words, Lines or A delimiter.
3. Enter the Size of each part (for the first three modes) or the Delimiter (for the last one).
4. Choose what goes Between parts (an empty line, a line break or a --- line) and tick Number the parts (1/5) if you want numbering.
5. The result and the number of parts update as you type. Press Copy or Download .txt, or Use as input to split the result again.

The four ways to split

In Characters and Words mode the text is first broken into words at spaces, tabs and line breaks, then rebuilt with a single space between words. Paragraph breaks, tabs and double spaces therefore disappear, which is what you want for posts and messages but not for structured text. To keep the layout, split by Lines or by a delimiter such as \n\n (an empty line).

Rules and edge cases

• Character count. A part’s length counts letters, spaces and punctuation. Most emoji count as 2, as they do on X. So Hello world 👋 again with size 13 gives Hello world and 👋 again, because Hello world 👋 would be 14.
• Words longer than the size are cut at the size, so a long link may end up across two parts: https://example.com/a-very-long-path with size 15 gives https://example, .com/a-very-lon and g-path. Cuts always fall between characters, so an emoji, flag or accented letter is never split; when the next character would not fit, the part is a little shorter than the size.
• Trimming. Every part has spaces and line breaks removed from its start and end, and empty parts are dropped. With Lines that also removes the indent on the first line of a part.
• Empty lines count as lines in Lines mode. A part made only of empty lines is dropped, so the number of parts can be lower than lines ÷ size.
• Delimiters are matched exactly, case and spaces included, and removed from the output. \n means a line break. Windows, Mac and Unix line endings are all treated as line breaks in Lines mode.
• Numbering adds (1/5) to the end of each part. In Characters mode the splitter reserves room for the suffix, so every numbered part, suffix included, fits the size: 200 copies of word at size 280 give four parts of 280, 280, 280 and 180 characters. Reserving that room can add a part. In Words and Lines mode the size counts words or lines, so the suffix simply goes on the end. With numbering on and a very small size, the suffix leaves little room, so words are cut into short pieces: one two three four at size 9 gives one (1/6), two (2/6), thr (3/6), ee (4/6), fou (5/6) and r (6/6). When the suffix cannot fit at all (size 7 or less in that example), the splitter keeps words whole, numbers the plain split (one two (1/3), three (2/3), four (3/3)) and warns that the size is too small to fit the (n/N) numbers, so the numbered parts are longer than the size. Use a larger size or turn numbering off.
• Size is a whole number of at least 1; decimals are rounded down.

Worked examples

By characters, size 20, Line break between parts, numbering on. Each part, with its number, is at most 20 characters, which takes four parts instead of three:

Before:
The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.

After:
The quick (1/4)
brown fox (2/4)
jumps over the (3/4)
lazy dog. (4/4)

By words, size 3:

By lines, size 2, numbering on:

Before:
apple
banana
cherry
date
elderberry

After:
apple
banana (1/3)

cherry
date (2/3)

elderberry (3/3)

By delimiter ;: red; green;; blue ; becomes red, green and blue, three parts, because the empty piece between ;; and the one after the last ; are dropped and spaces around each piece are trimmed.

When people need it

• Threads on X. X counts up to 280 characters per post, with every link counted as 23 characters and emoji and Chinese, Japanese or Korean characters as 2 each. Our splitter counts links at their full length, so a post with a long link has room to spare once posted. Check any part you are unsure about with the character counter; other platforms’ limits are in the character limits cheat sheet.
• Long SMS messages. A single text message holds 160 GSM-7 characters, but a long message is sent in segments of 153 characters each. One emoji or other non-GSM character switches the message to UCS-2, where segments hold 67 characters. Use 153 or 67 to see where the segments break.
• Word-limited form fields. Split a long answer into 250-word parts with Words, then edit each one.
• Batches of a list. Split 1,000 email addresses or product IDs into groups of 100 with Lines, for tools that accept a limited number of rows at a time. Count the list first with the line counter.
• Pasting a document into a chatbot. Split by characters or by paragraphs (delimiter \n\n) to send a long text in pieces.
• Breaking up an export. A delimiter such as --- or ; turns one long string into one record per part. Text copied from a PDF usually needs its stray line breaks fixed first; see removing line breaks from PDF text.

Splitting into spreadsheet columns instead

This tool gives text back, one part after another. If you want each piece in its own cell, do it in the spreadsheet. Excel’s Text to Columns wizard splits a column at a delimiter, and the TEXTSPLIT function, in Microsoft 365 and Excel 2024, does the same as a formula: =TEXTSPLIT(A1, ","). Google Sheets has =SPLIT(A1, ","), which drops the delimiter and, by default, empty pieces. To go the other way and join a column into one comma-separated line, use the comma separator.

Questions