CSV to TSV Converter
Convert CSV to tab-separated text that pastes cleanly into spreadsheets and loads into tools that want TSV — with quoted commas and multi-line cells parsed properly first.
CSV to TSV Converter
Runs in your browser — nothing you enter is uploaded or stored.
Scratchpad auto-saved
How it works — in four simple steps
No signup and nothing to install — it all runs in your browser.
Add your CSV
Paste it into the left box, press Open file, or drag a .csv file onto it. Sample loads a realistic example.
Set the options
Adjust the options above the boxes — the output updates instantly as you change them.
Check the result
Read the status line: it reports rows, keys and any value that couldn't be represented in TSV.
Copy or download
Copy the TSV or download it as a .tsv file. Nothing was uploaded at any point.
Going into a spreadsheet? Press Copy and paste into a cell — TSV splits into columns automatically.
Features
Delimiter auto-detection
Comma, semicolon, tab or pipe is sniffed from the first lines — European Excel exports with ; just work.
Header row or not
Use the first row as field names, or treat every row as data with generated column1, column2… names.
Private by design
Parsing and conversion run in your browser with JavaScript — your data is never uploaded, logged or stored.
About the CSV to TSV Converter
Tab-separated values are handy because tabs almost never appear inside real data: you can paste TSV into Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers and it lands in the right columns; command-line tools like cut -f, awk -F'\t' and sort -t$'\t' work on it without a CSV parser; and many bioinformatics and machine-learning tools require it.
The CSV is parsed by an RFC 4180 parser with delimiter detection (comma, semicolon, tab or pipe), so "Hampton, VA" is one field and "" inside quotes is a literal quote. The output uses a tab between fields and LF line endings, and fields are left unquoted unless they contain a tab, a quote or a line break — the same convention Excel uses when it saves Text (Tab delimited).
If you'll paste the result into a spreadsheet, use Copy; to keep it as a file, Download saves a .tsv. Untick Header row to drop the first line when appending rows to an existing table.
Examples
A CSV with a quoted comma, an escaped quote and a multi-line address.
name,address,notes
"Lovelace, Ada","12 St James's Square
London","Said ""the engine might compose music"""
Turing,Bletchley Park,name address notes
Lovelace, Ada "12 St James's Square
London" "Said ""the engine might compose music"""
Turing Bletchley Park This output was produced by the converter on this page with the default options — load it with the “Quoted CSV” preset above and change any option to see the effect.
How CSV maps to TSV
| In CSV | Becomes in TSV |
|---|---|
a,b,c | a⇥b⇥c |
"Hampton, VA" | Hampton, VA (no quotes needed) |
"5"" screen" | "5"" screen" (quote inside stays quoted) |
| Semicolon CSV | auto-detected, then tabs |
| CRLF line endings | LF |
| Header row | kept, or dropped with Header row off |
Things that trip people up
- Tabs inside cells. Strict IANA TSV forbids them; this tool quotes such fields like Excel does. If a consumer can't handle quotes, replace tabs in the source first.
- Wrong delimiter guessed. For very short files auto-detection can pick wrong; set the delimiter explicitly.
- Encoding. If accented characters look garbled, the CSV wasn't UTF-8. Re-export it as UTF-8 and open it again.
- Spreadsheet reformatting. When you paste TSV into a sheet, the spreadsheet may turn 1-2 into a date or drop leading zeros — set those columns to Plain text first.
CSV vs TSV at a glance
| Property | CSV | TSV |
|---|---|---|
| Specification | RFC 4180 (2005) | IANA text/tab-separated-values |
| File extension | .csv | .tsv / .tab |
| Media type | text/csv | text/tab-separated-values |
| Data types | text only — every cell is a string | text only |
| Comments | No | No |
| Nesting | None (flat rows) | None (flat rows) |
- CSV: Fields containing a comma, a double quote or a line break must be wrapped in double quotes, and a quote inside is written twice ("").
- TSV: The IANA definition has no quoting at all: a field simply may not contain a tab or a line break.