If you work anywhere near spreadsheets and code, you'll eventually run into this exact situation: someone hands you a CSV export from Excel or Google Sheets, and you need it as JSON for an API, a script, or a database import. Or the reverse, you have JSON and someone wants a spreadsheet.
It sounds like it should be trivial, and mostly it is, until your data has a comma inside a value, or a name with an apostrophe, or a blank cell, and suddenly your "quick conversion" is producing broken output. Here's what's actually going on under the hood, so you can do this reliably.
What CSV and JSON actually are
CSV (comma-separated values) is a plain text format for tables: one line per row, values separated by commas, and usually a header row naming each column. It's what you get when you export a spreadsheet as plain text.
JSON (JavaScript Object Notation) represents structured data as nested objects and arrays, the format nearly every API, config file, and modern app expects. A table of people in CSV becomes, in JSON, an array where each row is one object with the column names as keys.
