CSV to TSV
Input
id,city
1,"London, UK"
2,ParisOutput
id city
1 London, UK
2 ParisThe quotes disappear because a comma needs no escaping once tab is the delimiter.
About this tool
TSV uses a tab between fields instead of a comma. That one change removes the most common source of CSV breakage, because tabs almost never occur inside real data whereas commas appear constantly in names, addresses and prose.
The trade-off is that TSV has no agreed quoting convention. CSV has RFC 4180 to define how a field containing the delimiter is escaped; TSV has nothing equivalent, so the only safe approach is to ensure no value contains a tab at all.
How to use it
- Paste or upload CSVDrop a .csv file onto the input pane, use the file picker, or paste the text directly.
- Adjust the options if neededThe defaults suit most input. Open Options to change how values are interpreted or formatted.
- ConvertPress Convert to TSV, or use Ctrl+Enter (Cmd+Enter on macOS).
- Read any warningsWarnings explain anything that could not be represented exactly in the target format.
- Copy or downloadCopy the result, or download it as a .tsv file.
Worked examples
Each example below is executed against this tool by the test suite, so what you see is what the tool actually produces.
What to watch for
The details that decide whether a conversion is correct, and where information can be lost without any error being raised.
- Quoting is removed, not translated
- A CSV field is quoted when it contains a comma, but in TSV a comma is just an ordinary character, so the quotes serve no purpose and are stripped. The value "London, UK" becomes the plain text London, UK with no quoting at all.
- Tabs and newlines inside values are replaced
- This is the important caveat. Because TSV has no way to escape a tab, any value containing one would silently create extra columns. Tabs and line breaks inside values are therefore replaced with a single space, and a warning tells you it happened. That is lossy, but it is the only option that keeps the columns aligned.
- Why TSV is often the better paste format
- Pasting tab-separated text into Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers splits it into columns automatically with no import dialog, because tab is the clipboard convention for tabular data. TSV is also the native format for many bioinformatics and data-science pipelines.
Limitations
- Tabs and line breaks inside values are replaced with spaces, because TSV cannot escape them.
- Quoting is discarded, so a round trip back to CSV will not reproduce the original quoting.
- Processing happens in your browser, so very large inputs are bounded by available memory. Files above roughly 10 MB are handled but will feel slower, and multi-hundred-megabyte files are better suited to a command-line tool.
Questions
- What happens to a value that contains a tab?
- The tab is replaced with a space and a warning is shown. TSV has no escaping mechanism, so leaving the tab in place would create a spurious extra column.
- Why convert to TSV at all?
- Mainly for reliable pasting into spreadsheets, and for tools that expect tab-separated input. It also avoids the quoting ambiguity that makes CSV hard to parse correctly.