How must a CSV file be formatted for importing?

Unfortunately CSV is not a standardized format and there are lots of different CSV variants.

Wokabulary supports the most common CSV formats as used by most other vocabulary trainers as well as by Apple Numbers and Microsoft Excel. CSV data is expected to meet the following requirements:

  • data sets (= word pairs) are separated by new lines (Windows or Unix line breaks)
  • values within a data set (= your word, foreign word, comment, tag) are separated by comma, semicolon or tab
  • the value separator may only be used within values if the value is set in quotes ("")
  • UTF-8 text encoding is recommended

You should be able to set these constraints when exporting your CSV file. If not you can easily modify your CSV file using any text editor. Just open the CSV file in the text editor and use search and replace to set the separators to comma or tabs. Most text editors (like Tincta) also allow you to change the line endings and the text encoding. 

The columns of each dataset must be in the following structure

Foreign Word   |   Translation   |   Comment (optional)   |   Tag (optional)   |   Tag (optional)

A  sample French-English CSV file should look like this in your text editor:


"house","la maison","La maison est rouge","city","lession 1"
"sun","le soleil","La soleil brille", "nature"
"flower","la fleur","","nature"
"sky","le ciel","","nature","lesson 2"
"tree","l'arbre","","nature"
....
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