A lot of database systems use the tabulator as the field delimiter (even Cumulus while exporting data from a catalog). If your import text file uses another character as field separator, you can specify the appropriate delimiter. Also, the delimiter for category levels can be set to any character.

If the delimiter character is used as a normal character within the content of a field, you must enclose the respective field in double quotes in order to escape the contained delimiter character. All characters enclosed in double quotes, including the delimiter character, are interpreted as a text block. For example, your CSV file uses the colon as a delimiter and contains a field which has the colon in its name, such as Author: Title. To import this field pro­perly, it must be escaped as follows: "Author: Title". Without the quotes, the importer would generate 2 fields, Author and Title.

Make sure to properly match any opening quotes with corresponding closing quotes. As long as the importer doesn't find matching closing quotes, it won't recognize a delimiter character, which will cause the import to fail.

If double quotes are used as normal characters within the content of a field, you must escape any of these double quotes with a second double quote. For example, your CSV file uses the colon as a delimiter and contains a fields Author: "Title". To import this field properly, it must be escaped as follows: "Author: ""Title""".

If the delimiter character is not used anywhere in the field content of the import file, you can add an exclamation mark (!) to the specified delimiter, thus switching to a simple importing mode that treats any character other than the delimiter character as normal characters, including any double quotes. For example, enter \t! into the Other field if the tab is used as delimiter, or enter ,! if the comma is used.