Multi-value deduplication means matching records when one field contains several values.
This happens often in CSV files and scraped data.
Examples:
- Several emails in one cell
- Several phone numbers in one cell
- Tags separated by semicolons
- Multiple website URLs
- Several LinkedIn URLs
Why multi-value fields are hard to deduplicate
Raw matching compares the whole cell.
These two values do not match exactly:
john@example.com; sales@example.comsales@example.com
But they share one email. A multi-value dedupe rule can split the values and compare each one.
📌 Short version
Multi-value deduplication checks values inside a cell, not only the full cell text.
When to use multi-value deduplication
Use it when a column contains values separated by:
- Semicolons
- Commas
- Spaces
- Line breaks
Before running the check, confirm the delimiter. See What is a CSV delimiter? if the file structure is unclear.
Datablist workflow
Datablist supports multi-value matching in the Duplicates Remover.
When multi-value matching is enabled, Datablist can also combine conflicting values during auto-merge using a semicolon delimiter.
For a full example, read the deduplicate multiple-value field guide.