TSV to CSV Converter
Convert tab-separated data to CSV with correct RFC 4180 quoting: any field that contains a comma, a quote or a line break is wrapped in quotes so the columns never shift.
TSV to CSV 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 TSV
Paste it into the left box, press Open file, or drag a .tsv 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 CSV.
Copy or download
Copy the CSV or download it as a .csv file. Nothing was uploaded at any point.
Copy cells from Excel or Google Sheets and paste them straight in — the clipboard holds TSV.
Features
Header row or not
Use the first row as field names, or treat every row as data with generated column1, column2… names.
Any output delimiter
Comma for most tools, semicolon for European Excel, tab or pipe when your data is full of commas.
Opens cleanly in Excel
Add a UTF-8 byte-order mark so Excel on Windows shows accents, ₹, € and emoji correctly instead of mojibake.
Quoting control
Quote only the fields that need it (RFC 4180 minimal) or every field for strict importers.
Private by design
Parsing and conversion run in your browser with JavaScript — your data is never uploaded, logged or stored.
About the TSV to CSV Converter
TSV is what you get when you copy cells out of Excel or Google Sheets, export from many databases (COPY … TO in PostgreSQL defaults to tabs), or download datasets from sources like IMDb and NCBI. It's simple: one row per line, a tab between fields. CSV is what most importers expect. Swapping tabs for commas with find-and-replace breaks the moment a field contains a comma — Hampton, VA silently becomes two columns.
This converter parses the TSV properly and then writes CSV following RFC 4180: fields are separated by commas, rows end with CRLF, and a field is quoted only if it contains the delimiter, a double quote or a line break, with inner quotes doubled. Quoted TSV fields (which Excel writes when a cell contains a tab or a line break) are understood on input too, so multi-line cells survive.
Choose semicolons as the output delimiter for Excel in regions that use a decimal comma, Quote every field for strict importers, and UTF-8 BOM if the CSV will be double-clicked open in Excel on Windows.
Examples
Cells copied from a spreadsheet arrive as TSV; two of them contain commas and one contains a quote.
city state population note
Hampton, VA Virginia 137148 NASA Langley
Pune Maharashtra 3124458 "Oxford of the East"
Springfield Illinois 114394 5" of snow in Jancity,state,population,note
"Hampton, VA",Virginia,137148,NASA Langley
Pune,Maharashtra,3124458,Oxford of the East
Springfield,Illinois,114394,"5"" of snow in Jan"This output was produced by the converter on this page with the default options — load it with the “Clipboard paste” preset above and change any option to see the effect.
How TSV maps to CSV
| In TSV | Becomes in CSV |
|---|---|
| Tab between fields | comma (or ; | tab) |
Hampton, VA | "Hampton, VA" |
5" screen | "5"" screen" |
| Quoted multi-line cell from Excel | quoted multi-line CSV field |
| Line ending LF | CRLF (RFC 4180) |
| Empty field | empty field (nothing between commas) |
Things that trip people up
- Pasted from a web page. Text copied from an HTML table is usually tab-separated already — paste it here directly. If it pasted with spaces instead, use HTML Table to CSV on the page source.
- Trailing tabs. Rows ending in a tab have an empty last field; that column is kept so every row has the same length.
- Numbers stay as written. Nothing is retyped: 007, 1.50 and 1e5 are copied exactly, so codes and versions aren't altered.
- Not really tab-separated? If the first lines contain no tabs at all, the input is probably space-aligned text. Use CSV to JSON with a custom delimiter, or fix the source export.
TSV vs CSV at a glance
| Property | TSV | CSV |
|---|---|---|
| Specification | IANA text/tab-separated-values | RFC 4180 (2005) |
| File extension | .tsv / .tab | .csv |
| Media type | text/tab-separated-values | text/csv |
| Data types | text only | text only — every cell is a string |
| Comments | No | No |
| Nesting | None (flat rows) | None (flat rows) |
- TSV: The IANA definition has no quoting at all: a field simply may not contain a tab or a line break.
- 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 ("").