Invalid vCard: missing BEGIN:VCARD / END:VCARD

This is one of the most common hard failures in vCard imports. Every contact record must be wrapped exactly like this:

BEGIN:VCARD
...
END:VCARD

If either line is missing (or malformed), many apps will refuse to import the file.

Common causes

• The file is not a vCard (it’s CSV/JSON/other)
• A tool exported “vCard-like” data but didn’t include wrappers
• The file was truncated during download or copy/paste
• Wrappers were misspelled (e.g., BEGIN: VCARD) or have trailing spaces
• Multiple contacts were concatenated incorrectly

How to fix it

1) Verify the first non-empty line

The first record should start with BEGIN:VCARD (no leading junk).

2) Ensure each record has an END:VCARD

Search the file. For each BEGIN:VCARD, there must be a matching END:VCARD.

3) Normalize whitespace and line endings

Use consistent newlines (LF is safest) and remove trailing spaces on wrapper lines.

Recommended workflow

If the file has more than a few records, validating and generating a repaired .vcf is usually quicker than manual editing.

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