How to extract a single column from text
When a list has names, phone numbers and cities glued together with commas or tabs, pulling out just one of those fields usually means opening a spreadsheet. For a short list this is faster: paste the text, pick the delimiter and the column number, and the matching value from every row comes back one per line.
Columns are numbered from 1. The leftmost field is column 1, so enter 3 to grab the third value. The delimiter can be a comma, tab, semicolon, pipe or whitespace, or anything you type yourself. Choosing whitespace treats a run of spaces as a single separator, so columns stay aligned even in text that was padded out for readability.
Rows that simply do not have the column you asked for — say you want column 3 from a row with two fields — are skipped by default and counted separately. Untick the skip option to leave a blank line instead so the output lines up with the input row for row. One limitation is worth knowing: this is a plain split on the delimiter, so commas inside quoted fields are not respected. For a proper quoted CSV, a spreadsheet is the safer tool. Everything runs in your browser.
Frequently asked questions
It is 1. The leftmost column is number 1, so enter 2 to pull the second value from each row.
No. The text is split on the delimiter directly, so a comma inside quotes also starts a new column. Open that kind of file in a spreadsheet instead.