Malformed quotes
“Malformed quotes” errors happen when a CSV field’s quoting breaks standard CSV rules—most commonly an unclosed quote, an unexpected quote character, or a line break inside a quoted value that the importer can’t parse. Once quoting is off, column counts often appear wrong in subsequent rows.
Common causes
- Unclosed quote (a field starts with a quote but never ends)
- Unescaped quotes inside a quoted value (should be doubled:
"") - Line breaks inside fields without proper quoting
- Mismatched quote characters (smart quotes or mixed quote types)
- Partial quoting (a quote appears mid-field and confuses the parser)
Examples that trigger “malformed quotes”
1) Unclosed quote
id,comment
1,"hello world
2,"this is fine"Row 1 opens a quote but never closes it, so the parser may treat the rest of the file as part of that field.
2) Quote inside a quoted value (needs escaping)
id,comment
1,"She said "hello" to me"
2,"ok"If you need a quote character inside a quoted field, it usually must be escaped by doubling it (e.g., ""hello"").
3) Line break inside a field (not properly quoted)
id,notes
1,first line
second line
2,okA raw newline splits the record into multiple rows. If you need line breaks inside a field, the field must be properly quoted.
4) Smart quotes (non-standard quote characters)
id,comment
1,“hello world”
2,“ok”Some exports replace normal quotes with “smart quotes”, which many importers don’t treat as valid CSV quoting.
How to diagnose malformed quotes quickly
Many importers stop at the first parse failure. CSV Checker scans the entire file and reports every row affected by malformed quoting, including the row/column location and related downstream issues (like unexpected column counts).