CSV to TSV Converter

Why Proper Parsing Matters Here Too

CSV fields can be quoted and contain commas or newlines - simply replacing top-level commas with tabs would break on any field like "Smith, John". This tool parses the CSV correctly first, then serializes as TSV.

How to Use It

1. Paste or upload CSV data.
2. Click Convert.
3. Copy or download the resulting TSV.

Limitations

TSV has no standard quoting convention the way CSV does - a field containing a literal tab or newline can't be represented cleanly in plain TSV, so this tool replaces those characters with a space to keep the row structure intact rather than silently breaking the format.

Example

The CSV line "Smith, John",42,"Pune" becomes three tab-separated fields: Smith, John, 42 and Pune. The quotes are removed because TSV does not need them - a comma is just an ordinary character when the separator is a tab.

When TSV Is the Better Choice

• Pasting into spreadsheets. Google Sheets and Excel split tab-separated text into columns automatically when you paste it.
• Command-line tools. cut -f2, awk -F'\t' and sort -t$'\t' handle tabs far more reliably than quoted CSV.
• Data with many commas. Addresses, descriptions and numbers formatted as 1,250 are simpler in TSV.
• Bioinformatics and research data, where TSV is the common exchange format.

Things to Check

• Multi-line fields cannot survive in plain TSV, so line breaks inside a field are replaced with a space.
• Leading zeros (postcodes, phone numbers) stay as text in the file, but a spreadsheet may still drop them on import - set that column to text.

Convert back with TSV to CSV, or turn the data into JSON with CSV to JSON.