Is a .txt file just a renamed .csv?

Only when the delimiter happens to be a comma. Most tools that ask for a "text file" mean tab-delimited, and some legacy loaders mean fixed-width with no delimiter at all. Renaming survey.csv to survey.txt does not change what is inside it, which is why the import still fails.

Which delimiter should I choose?

Tab, unless something told you otherwise. Tab is the default for Stata’s import delimited, SAS PROC IMPORT with DBMS=TAB, and R’s read.table. Commas break on European decimal commas and on any text value that contains one; semicolons and pipes are the usual escape hatches when your data is full of commas.

Why does Excel turn my accented characters into symbols?

Excel’s Text Import Wizard assumes the system code page unless the file starts with a UTF-8 byte order mark. Choose "UTF-8 with BOM" here and the accents survive. Every other destination on this page prefers plain UTF-8 without the BOM, which is why the setting changes when you switch destinations.

CRLF for Windows tools (Stata and SAS on Windows, Excel), LF for anything running on macOS or Linux, including pandas and most R setups. Getting it wrong usually shows up as a stray \r at the end of the last column, or a phantom blank row.

Do I keep the value labels or the numeric codes?

Labels if a human will read the file, codes if a statistics package will re-analyse it, both if you want the original coding preserved alongside readable text. A .txt file carries no metadata, so whichever you pick is all that survives — this is the one decision you cannot undo later from the text file alone.

What is fixed-width for?

Older loaders — some mainframe systems, some government data pipelines, older SAS INPUT statements — read columns by character position rather than by delimiter. Fixed-width pads every column to the widest value in it, and switches the header off by default, because those loaders usually expect data only.

Is my file uploaded anywhere?

No. The .sav is parsed by JavaScript inside this browser tab and the .txt is built in memory. Nothing is sent to a server, which is the point when the file is unpublished research data.

SAV to TXT: Pick the Delimiter Your Next Tool Actually Wants

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Convert SPSS .sav files to CSV, JSON, Excel or PDF, entirely in your browser. Value labels preserved, nothing uploaded.

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