vCard to CSV Converter

Why this runs in your browser

A contacts file is other people's phone numbers, email addresses and home addresses. It is exactly the kind of file that should not be pasted into a random web converter, which is where most "VCF to CSV" searches lead. This page does the whole conversion in your browser: the file is read from your device, converted in the page, and saved back to your device. Nothing is sent anywhere, and the page works offline once it has loaded.

How the conversion works

A vCard file holds one block per contact, from BEGIN:VCARD to END:VCARD, with one property per line — the name, each phone number, each email address, each postal address. Versions 3.0 and 4.0 are both read; 3.0 is what iPhone and Google Contacts export, and it is what this page writes back out.

Three details of the format trip up simple converters, and all three are handled. Long lines are folded — split across several lines with a space at the start of each continuation — so a long address or note has to be put back together before anything else is read. Commas and semicolons inside a value are escaped with a backslash, because the bare characters separate the parts of a name or an address. And a contact usually has several phone numbers and email addresses, each with a label such as home, work or mobile.

The columns

Every CSV starts with the same columns: the full name, the parts of the name (prefix, given, additional, family, suffix), nickname, organization, department, title, role, birthday and note. After those come one column per kind of value and label found in the file: tel_cell, tel_work, email_home, url_homepage, and so on. A postal address becomes a group of columns — adr_home_street, adr_home_city, adr_home_region, adr_home_postcode, adr_home_country — so it can be sorted and filtered like the rest.

When a contact has two values with the same label, the second gets a number rather than overwriting the first: tel_cell and tel_cell_2. Custom labels from an iPhone ("School friend") become columns too, as tel_school_friend.

Anything without a column of its own — a contact photo, an anniversary, a custom field — goes into a final extra column, word for word. That is what lets a contact survive the trip to CSV and back intact: converting the CSV back to vCard writes those lines out again.

Going back: CSV to vCard

A CSV made by this page converts straight back. A CSV from somewhere else works too, as long as it uses these column names; a column the page does not recognise is kept as a custom property rather than dropped, and the page tells you which ones it was. If a row has no full name, one is made from the name parts, or from the organization for a business. The result imports into iPhone Contacts, Google Contacts, Outlook and most address books.