Convert CSV to TSV Online — Free

How to convert CSV to TSV

1. 1

   Add your CSV file

   Drop or select a .csv file. Files up to 50MB process locally in your browser — nothing uploaded.

2. 2

   Run the conversion

   Your CSV parses in the browser (handling RFC 4180 quoted fields, embedded commas, and escaped quotes), then re-emits with tab (0x09) as the delimiter. Since tab characters inside fields are rare, TSV typically doesn't need quoting — values with tabs or newlines are escaped if present.

3. 3

   Download your TSV

   One click saves the result as a .tsv file. Your original file stays on your device.

Why convert CSV to TSV?

TSV is preferred by many scientific and bioinformatics tools (where commas often appear in data like taxonomy names), certain database bulk loaders (PostgreSQL's default text format), Unix/CLI utilities like cut, awk, and sort (which default to tab-delimiting), and R/Python data loaders that handle TSV slightly better than CSV in edge cases. TSV also avoids the locale issue where European Excel expects semicolon-delimited 'CSV'.

Common CSV to TSV use cases

• Preparing a CSV dataset for a bioinformatics pipeline (BEDtools, samtools) that expects TSV input
• Converting Excel-exported CSV into TSV for pipe-in to Unix CLI tools (awk, cut, sort) for text processing
• Loading a CSV into PostgreSQL with the default COPY FROM (tab-delimited) format without specifying FORMAT csv
• Feeding a CSV into an R script or Python pandas workflow where TSV is the team standard to avoid comma edge cases

What file size to expect

A 10,000-row CSV of 1 MB typically becomes a TSV of 900-950 KB — slightly smaller because TSV rarely needs to quote fields (tabs almost never appear in data), so the quote marks around comma-containing fields are removed.

Technical notes: CSV → TSV

CSV input parses per RFC 4180 — fields in double-quotes can contain commas, newlines, and escaped quotes (doubled '' inside quoted fields). Output uses tab (0x09) as the sole delimiter; newlines (\n) separate rows. Fields containing tabs (rare) or newlines (rare) are quoted to remain parseable. UTF-8 encoding is preserved end-to-end. Empty fields become empty TSV fields (two tabs in a row).

Compatibility and browser support

TSV output is parseable by Pandas (read_csv with sep='\t'), R (read.delim), bioinformatics tools (bedtools, samtools), Unix CLI tools (cut, awk, sort with appropriate flags), and databases with tab-delimited import modes. Most spreadsheet apps (Excel, Google Sheets) also open TSV, though you may need to specify tab delimiter during import.

CSV vs TSV

Frequently Asked Questions