What's different from CSV?

Tabs as delimiter instead of commas. TSV is simpler — tabs almost never appear in text, so no quoting/escaping rules are needed.

Which tools prefer TSV?

Excel imports it cleanly, Bash pipelines handle it with `awk`/`cut`, and data-science tools (pandas, R) read it slightly faster than CSV.

Replaced with spaces by default. Toggle 'preserve tabs with escape' to use `\t` — but most tools won't unescape them.

TSV doesn't have a newline-escape standard. Multi-line values break TSV parsing; the tool warns and offers newline-replacement options.

Convert JSON array to Tab-Separated Values. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the Converters collection.

TSV is preferred over CSV in bioinformatics because biological data rarely contains tabs but often contains commas.
The IANA registered the text/tab-separated-values MIME type in 1993, making TSV one of the earliest registered text formats.
TSV files are directly pasteable into spreadsheet applications, as tabs naturally align with cell boundaries.

What's different from CSV?: Tabs as delimiter instead of commas. TSV is simpler — tabs almost never appear in text, so no quoting/escaping rules are needed.
Which tools prefer TSV?: Excel imports it cleanly, Bash pipelines handle it with `awk`/`cut`, and data-science tools (pandas, R) read it slightly faster than CSV.
How does it handle tabs in values?: Replaced with spaces by default. Toggle 'preserve tabs with escape' to use `\t` — but most tools won't unescape them.
What about multi-line values?: TSV doesn't have a newline-escape standard. Multi-line values break TSV parsing; the tool warns and offers newline-replacement options.

Convert JSON array to Tab-Separated Values. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the Converters collection.

TSV is preferred over CSV in bioinformatics because biological data rarely contains tabs but often contains commas.
The IANA registered the text/tab-separated-values MIME type in 1993, making TSV one of the earliest registered text formats.
TSV files are directly pasteable into spreadsheet applications, as tabs naturally align with cell boundaries.

What's different from CSV?: Tabs as delimiter instead of commas. TSV is simpler — tabs almost never appear in text, so no quoting/escaping rules are needed.
Which tools prefer TSV?: Excel imports it cleanly, Bash pipelines handle it with `awk`/`cut`, and data-science tools (pandas, R) read it slightly faster than CSV.
How does it handle tabs in values?: Replaced with spaces by default. Toggle 'preserve tabs with escape' to use `\t` — but most tools won't unescape them.
What about multi-line values?: TSV doesn't have a newline-escape standard. Multi-line values break TSV parsing; the tool warns and offers newline-replacement options.