TSV ↔ CSV Converter

Convert TSV (tab-separated values, the format you get when you copy from a spreadsheet) to CSV (comma-separated, what most tools want), or convert CSV to TSV when you need to paste straight into Excel / Sheets without the import wizard. Quoting follows RFC 4180 on the CSV side so fields containing commas, newlines, or double quotes survive a round trip.

How to use the TSV ↔ CSV Converter

Pick a direction. TSV→CSV parses on tab boundaries, then quotes any field containing a comma, double-quote, or line break, doubling embedded quotes per RFC 4180. CSV→TSV does the opposite — strips CSV quoting, replaces literal tabs in fields with spaces (TSV has no escape mechanism), and joins fields with tabs.

About TSV ↔ CSV Converter

CSV is older, more standardised, and more brittle. The RFC 4180 spec is clear about quoting and escaping rules, but in practice every tool reads CSV slightly differently — some choke on embedded newlines, some treat semicolons as the delimiter in European locales. TSV has the opposite problem: it has no formal spec, but the absence of common delimiters in everyday text (tabs are rare in business data) makes it more reliable in practice. Spreadsheets paste as TSV, command-line tools (cut, awk) work naturally with TSV, and many data pipelines prefer it because there’s nothing to escape.

This converter doesn’t guess. It treats TSV as strictly tab-delimited (no escaping mechanism). When converting to TSV, any tabs inside fields are replaced with spaces, since silently breaking the format is worse than losing whitespace. When converting to CSV, full RFC 4180 quoting kicks in so the output round-trips through any compliant parser.

Common use cases

• Spreadsheet → database — paste from Google Sheets (TSV), convert to CSV, import via your DB’s CSV loader.
• CLI processing — awk and cut prefer TSV; convert a CSV export so you can pipe it cleanly.
• Quick data sharing — TSV pastes straight into a spreadsheet without an import dialog; convert your CSV for a faster paste.
• BigQuery / Snowflake exports often default to TSV with header — convert to CSV before sending to a partner that expects CSV.