TSV
Tab-Separated Values is CSV with a better delimiter. The format is otherwise identical, and the change removes most of the quoting problems that make CSV fragile.
- Type information
- None — every value is text
- Structure
- Flat rows and columns
- Compression
- None
- Typical file size
- Same as CSV
- Schema
- Header row at best
- Human-readable
- Yes, in any text editor
- Tool support
- Universal
TSVCSV
Runs on your deviceOptions
Reading TSV
Auto-detect reads the first rows and picks the separator that splits them consistently.
Turn off when the file starts straight into data. Columns are then named column_1, column_2, and so on.
Turns "42" into a number and "true" into a boolean. Values with leading zeros stay text so IDs and zip codes survive.
Which worksheet to convert. Filled in once the workbook is read.
Dotted path to the array of records, such as data.items. Leave empty to use the whole document.
Turns {"user":{"id":7}} into a user.id column. Arrays are kept as JSON text.
Pick the encoding the file was written in. Wrong encoding shows up as garbled accents.
Comma-separated words that should become null instead of text.
Writing CSV
Snappy is the default across Spark, DuckDB and pandas. Gzip is smaller but slower to read.
Turns a user.id column back into {"user":{"id":7}}.
Excel needs a byte order mark to open UTF-8 files with accents correctly.
Rows per row group. Larger groups compress better; smaller groups let readers skip more.
conversion-preroll
This short ad is what keeps the converter free.
Work with Parquet as well?See ParquetReader with ParquetReader — opens Parquet files directly.The argument for tabs is simple: commas appear inside real data constantly — in addresses, in names, in free text — while tabs almost never do. A delimiter that does not collide with your values needs far less quoting, and less quoting means fewer chances for a naive reader to get it wrong.
This is why TSV persists in places where correctness matters more than familiarity: database bulk loaders, bioinformatics pipelines, and command line tools like cut and awk that are tab-aware by default. The tradeoff is that dialects disagree — strict TSV forbids tabs and newlines inside values outright, while other tools quote them the way CSV does. Check a sample when loading into anything strict.
Visually, tabs render at whatever the tab stop happens to be, so columns rarely line up in an editor. That is a display artefact and not a sign the file is malformed.
What TSV is good at
- Tabs rarely occur inside real values, so quoting is seldom needed.
- Native to database bulk load commands and Unix text tools.
- Otherwise identical to CSV, so it is just as simple and just as streamable.
Where it falls short
- Same as CSV: no types, no schema, no compression.
- Dialects disagree on whether quoting or backslash escapes are correct.
- Columns look misaligned in editors because tab width varies.
- Less immediately familiar than CSV to non-technical recipients.