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TSV converter

A .tsv file stores a table as plain text with one record per line and a tab character between columns. It is CSV's stricter sibling: because literal tabs almost never occur inside data, most TSV files need no quoting rules at all.

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Runs on your device

Drop TSV files here

Batch files can each use a different output. Nothing uploads for local conversions.

Working inputs include camera RAW, browser-local audio/video, PDF, CBZ/CBR comics, office documents, ebooks, markup, 3D models, structured text, images, and archives.

Where TSV comes from

Tab-delimited exports predate any formal specification, but the text/tab-separated-values MIME type was registered with IANA in 1993 — over a decade before CSV received RFC 4180. Bioinformatics and database tooling standardized on tabs early, since gene names and street addresses so often contain commas.

How TSV works

  • One record per newline-terminated line, with fields split on the tab character (U+0009).
  • The IANA registration forbids tabs within field values entirely, sidestepping CSV's quote-escaping machinery.
  • There is no type system: every value is a string until the consumer decides otherwise.
  • Encoding is unspecified in practice; UTF-8 dominates today, but older exports may be Latin-1 or UTF-16.

When to use TSV

  • Database dumps — PostgreSQL's COPY and MySQL's SELECT INTO OUTFILE default to tabs.
  • Bioinformatics pipelines, where TSV is the lingua franca of gene and variant tables.
  • Clipboard interchange: spreadsheets copy cell ranges to the clipboard as TSV.
  • Log and ETL pipelines processed with cut, awk, and similar tools.

Strengths and limitations

Strengths

  • Trivially parseable — split each line on tab, no state machine required.
  • Pastes directly into and out of Excel and Google Sheets, because spreadsheet clipboards already speak tabs.
  • Plain text, so it diffs, greps, and version-controls cleanly.

Limitations

  • A single stray tab inside a value silently shifts every following column.
  • The delimiter is invisible in most editors, making malformed files hard to spot.
  • No standard conventions for headers, types, or missing values.

Compatibility

Every spreadsheet application imports TSV, command-line tools handle it natively, and any text editor opens it — though column alignment on screen can be misleading. Browsers treat it as downloadable plain text.

Convert TSV to another format

Convert other formats to TSV