AnyFormat

00 CSV → TSV

CSV to TSV

Tabs instead of commas, quoting preserved where it is still needed.

01CSV in
02TSV out
03Options 3

Exports from European versions of Excel use semicolons, because the comma is the decimal point there.

Off means rows come out as arrays instead of objects.

Off keeps every value as a string — safer for IDs, postcodes and phone numbers with leading zeroes.

  • No upload The conversion runs in this tab. Your file never travels — not to us, and not to the advertising.
  • No sign-up, no email, no daily cap There is no account system to sign up to.
  • No size limit we invented Only your device's memory — about ~2 GB on a desktop browser, ~400 MB on a phone.
  • Turn your Wi-Fi off and convert anyway The conversion needs nothing but this page. Ads will not load without a connection; your file will still convert. That is the whole claim, and it takes five seconds to check.

Swaps commas for tabs. The reason to do this is that free text almost never contains a tab but very often contains a comma, so TSV survives naive parsers that CSV defeats.

Quoting is still needed sometimes

A field that genuinely contains a tab or a newline is still quoted, because otherwise the row structure breaks. Many TSV consumers assume no quoting at all and would misread such a field — if yours is one of them, check whether your data contains tabs before relying on the file.

Where TSV is expected

Bioinformatics pipelines, several database bulk-loaders, and anything that reads with cut -f or awk -F'\t'. It is also what you get when you copy cells out of Excel or Google Sheets onto the clipboard, which is why pasting a spreadsheet into a text editor produces tab-separated text.

Fields that contain a tab

The whole appeal of TSV is that a reader can split on the tab character and stop thinking. That only works if no value contains one. Where a CSV field does, the tab is replaced rather than escaped, because the alternative is emitting a file that every simple TSV reader will parse into the wrong number of columns. Newlines inside a quoted CSV field are handled the same way. If your data genuinely needs those characters, CSV is the format that can carry them and TSV is not.

Questions

Do I lose anything converting CSV to TSV?
No. Both hold the same data; only the separator differs. Values are preserved exactly.
What if a field contains a tab?
It is quoted so the row structure survives. Consumers that do not support quoting will misread it — check your data first if that is a concern.
Can I paste the result straight into a spreadsheet?
Yes. Tab-separated text is exactly what spreadsheets expect on the clipboard, so pasting it into Excel or Google Sheets fills the cells correctly with no import dialog.
Is my data uploaded anywhere?
No. The conversion runs as JavaScript inside this tab. Open your browser's Network panel and convert something — you will see no request carrying your data, because there is no server to send it to. You can also turn your Wi-Fi off and convert anyway.