Why choose TSV over CSV?

Because a tab almost never appears inside a value, while a comma appears in every address, every price written the European way, every sentence. TSV sidesteps the delimiter collision that makes CSV fragile — and the semicolon wars that follow it across European locales.

What happens if a value contains a tab?

It is quoted, the way CSV quotes a comma. That keeps the file readable by anything that understands CSV-style quoting — which is most spreadsheet software — but be aware that the strict TSV definition has no quoting at all and simply forbids tabs inside fields. If your consumer is strict, strip tabs before converting.

Can Excel open a TSV?

Yes, and more reliably than a CSV: with a `.tsv` or `.txt` extension it does not have to guess the delimiter. The encoding is still guessed, so accented text can still arrive mangled — the same problem as CSV, and the same workaround: save as UTF-8 with a byte-order mark, or import rather than open.

JSON to TSV — Tabs Instead of Commas

Convert JSON to tab-separated values. Tabs stay out of the way of the commas in your data, and the result pastes straight into a spreadsheet.

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What this tool does

The same table as the CSV conversion, with tabs between the fields:

[{ "name": "Ada", "born": 1815 }]

name	born
Ada	1815

The root has to be an array of objects, ragged records become the union of every key, and a nested value is written as JSON inside its cell — the rules are the ones the CSV conversion follows.

Why tabs

A comma is in every address, every European price, every sentence of prose. A semicolon is the European answer to that, which is why the same file opens differently in Paris and in Chicago.

A tab is in almost nothing. That is the whole argument for TSV, and it is a good one.

The catch worth knowing

TSV has two definitions, and they disagree.

The strict one — the IANA media type text/tab-separated-values — has no escaping mechanism at all. A field simply may not contain a tab or a newline.

The practical one, which spreadsheets use, borrows CSV’s quoting: a field containing a tab is wrapped in quotes.

This conversion writes the practical form, because it is what Excel, Numbers and LibreOffice read. If your consumer implements the strict definition, remove tabs from your values before converting rather than after — the quotes it does not understand will become part of your data.

Encoding, the usual warning

A tab solves the delimiter problem, not the encoding one. Excel still guesses the character set of a file it opens, and still guesses wrong for UTF-8 without a byte-order mark. Use the import dialog rather than a double-click, or go through the CSV conversion with its Excel option, which writes the mark.

Private by design

Everything runs locally in your browser with JavaScript. Your data is never uploaded, which makes the tool safe for sensitive content, and it keeps working offline.

Frequently asked questions

Why choose TSV over CSV?: Because a tab almost never appears inside a value, while a comma appears in every address, every price written the European way, every sentence. TSV sidesteps the delimiter collision that makes CSV fragile — and the semicolon wars that follow it across European locales.
What happens if a value contains a tab?: It is quoted, the way CSV quotes a comma. That keeps the file readable by anything that understands CSV-style quoting — which is most spreadsheet software — but be aware that the strict TSV definition has no quoting at all and simply forbids tabs inside fields. If your consumer is strict, strip tabs before converting.
Can Excel open a TSV?: Yes, and more reliably than a CSV: with a `.tsv` or `.txt` extension it does not have to guess the delimiter. The encoding is still guessed, so accented text can still arrive mangled — the same problem as CSV, and the same workaround: save as UTF-8 with a byte-order mark, or import rather than open.