TSV or CSV — which is better?

Depends. TSV: simpler (no quoting needed for commas), better for programmatic processing. CSV: universal standard, better for spreadsheet imports.

What about newlines in values?

Rare in TSV (you usually shouldn't). Common in CSV (RFC 4180 allows them in quoted fields). The converter preserves multi-line values correctly.

Yes — by looking at the delimiter in the first row. Manual override available for edge cases.

Toggle delimiter: comma, tab, semicolon, pipe. Extends to any single-character delimiter. For complex delimiters write a custom script.

A worked example, rendered from real sample data. Sign in to run the tool on your own input.

Input

name	email	age
Alice	alice@test.com	30
Bob	bob@test.com	25

Output

name,email,age
Alice,alice@test.com,30
Bob,bob@test.com,25

Convert between tab-separated and comma-separated values. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the Data / SQL collection.

TSV is the default export format for Google Sheets when using the IMPORTDATA function, not CSV.
The tab character (U+0009) was one of the original ASCII control characters defined in 1963.
Bioinformatics tools like BLAST and BED format use TSV exclusively because biological data rarely contains tabs.

TSV or CSV — which is better?: Depends. TSV: simpler (no quoting needed for commas), better for programmatic processing. CSV: universal standard, better for spreadsheet imports.
What about newlines in values?: Rare in TSV (you usually shouldn't). Common in CSV (RFC 4180 allows them in quoted fields). The converter preserves multi-line values correctly.
Does it detect the source format?: Yes — by looking at the delimiter in the first row. Manual override available for edge cases.
Can I convert to pipe-delimited?: Toggle delimiter: comma, tab, semicolon, pipe. Extends to any single-character delimiter. For complex delimiters write a custom script.

A worked example, rendered from real sample data. Sign in to run the tool on your own input.

Input

name	email	age
Alice	alice@test.com	30
Bob	bob@test.com	25

Output

name,email,age
Alice,alice@test.com,30
Bob,bob@test.com,25

Convert between tab-separated and comma-separated values. Part of the DevTools Surf developer suite. Browse more tools in the Data / SQL collection.

TSV is the default export format for Google Sheets when using the IMPORTDATA function, not CSV.
The tab character (U+0009) was one of the original ASCII control characters defined in 1963.
Bioinformatics tools like BLAST and BED format use TSV exclusively because biological data rarely contains tabs.

TSV or CSV — which is better?: Depends. TSV: simpler (no quoting needed for commas), better for programmatic processing. CSV: universal standard, better for spreadsheet imports.
What about newlines in values?: Rare in TSV (you usually shouldn't). Common in CSV (RFC 4180 allows them in quoted fields). The converter preserves multi-line values correctly.
Does it detect the source format?: Yes — by looking at the delimiter in the first row. Manual override available for edge cases.
Can I convert to pipe-delimited?: Toggle delimiter: comma, tab, semicolon, pipe. Extends to any single-character delimiter. For complex delimiters write a custom script.