vCard Duplicate Remover

Remove and merge duplicate vCard contacts

Exports from phones, mail apps, and CRMs often stack the same person into a .vcf file two or three times — one card with a work email, another with a mobile number, a third from an old sync. Paste the file here and get back a clean vCard with each contact appearing once. Matching runs across vCard 2.1, 3.0 (RFC 2426), and 4.0 (RFC 6350), and everything happens locally in your browser — your contacts are never uploaded.

Worked example

Two cards for the same person, each holding a different email and phone:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
FN:John Doe
EMAIL:[email protected]
TEL:+1-555-111-2222
END:VCARD
BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
FN:John Doe
EMAIL:[email protected]
TEL:1 (555) 111-2222
END:VCARD

With merge on, the two collapse into one card that keeps both emails while the repeated phone (same digits, written two ways) is kept only once:

BEGIN:VCARD
VERSION:3.0
FN:John Doe
EMAIL:[email protected]
TEL:+1-555-111-2222
EMAIL:[email protected]
END:VCARD

(The survivor keeps its own lines in order, then each new value from the other cards is appended.)

Options

• Treat as duplicates when they share (match_by) — pick how aggressively to group cards:
  • Any of name, email, or phone (any, default) — link cards that share any of those, so a renamed card and a card with a matching phone still merge.
  • The same full name (name) — match only on the display name (FN, or the structured N if there's no FN), compared case- and spacing-insensitively.
  • The same email address (email) — match only on a shared email (case-insensitive), regardless of name.
  • The same phone number (phone) — match only on a shared phone, compared by its digits so +1 (555) 123-4567 and 5551234567 count as one.
• Merge each group into one card (merge, default on) — combine every duplicate into a single card, unioning emails, phones, URLs, and addresses and filling empty singular fields (like ORG or TITLE) from later copies. Turn it off to simply keep the first card of each group and drop the rest without merging.

Limits & edge cases

• The first card of each group is the survivor: it keeps all of its own fields, and singular fields it already has are never overwritten by a later copy.
• Repeatable properties are de-duplicated by value — two EMAIL lines with the same address (any case) collapse to one, and two TEL lines with the same digits collapse to one, even if written with different punctuation.
• Phone matching compares all digits, so a number stored with a country code (+1 555…) will not match the same number stored without one (555…). Add or strip country codes first if you want those to merge.
• Cards with no name, email, or phone (nothing to match on) are always left as separate contacts.
• Input must contain at least one BEGIN:VCARD … END:VCARD block; text with no card returns an error rather than empty output.

FAQ