In one embodiment the present invention includes a computer-implemented method for data cleansing using rule based formatting. The method includes tokenizing and parsing a first input data and a second input data. The method further includes including a first token in a first output data if a first formatting rule component in a formatting rule is a first valid index to said first tokenized input data. The method further includes including a second token in a second output data if said first formatting rule component in the formatting rule is a second valid index to said second tokenized input data. The method further includes formatting said first output data and said second output data according to the formatting rule.