Convert JSON to TSV Online — Free

How to convert JSON to TSV

1. 1

   Add your JSON file

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

2. 2

   Run the conversion

   Your JSON is parsed in the browser, object keys become column headers, and each array element emits as a tab-separated row. Nested objects flatten with dot notation (user.address.city); arrays of primitives join with semicolons inside a single cell.

3. 3

   Download your TSV

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

Why convert JSON to TSV?

Many CLI tools (awk, cut, sort), R's read.delim, Python's pandas read_csv(sep='\t'), and certain databases (PostgreSQL COPY's default text format) prefer TSV when fields might contain commas. TSV avoids CSV's quoting complexity because tabs almost never appear inside real data. It's also the preferred format in bioinformatics, data science, and Unix-style pipelines.

Common JSON to TSV use cases

• Transforming a REST API's JSON response into TSV for piping through awk, cut, or sort in a shell script
• Converting a Mongo/Firebase JSON export into TSV for loading into PostgreSQL via COPY FROM (default tab format)
• Preparing JSON data for an R or pandas workflow where the team convention is TSV over CSV
• Generating bioinformatics-friendly TSV from JSON-based API data for BEDtools, samtools, or custom genomics pipelines

What file size to expect

A 10,000-record JSON array of objects (name, email, 5 fields) at 4 MB becomes a TSV of 1.6-2 MB — roughly 2-2.5× smaller because TSV doesn't repeat field names on every row and omits JSON's braces, quotes, and colons.

Technical notes: JSON → TSV

JSON input expects a root-level array of objects. Keys across objects are union'd to form the header row. Nested objects flatten via dot notation (user.address.city becomes one column); arrays of primitives semicolon-join within a cell; arrays of objects need upstream flattening. Output uses tab (0x09) as the sole delimiter; fields containing tabs (rare) or newlines are escaped or quoted. Numbers preserve precision; booleans become 'true'/'false'; null becomes empty. UTF-8 encoding throughout.

Compatibility and browser support

TSV output is parseable by Pandas (read_csv with sep='\t' or read_table), R (read.delim, read_tsv), Unix CLI tools with tab-delimiting, bioinformatics tools, and databases with tab-delimited import. Excel and Google Sheets also open TSV (specify tab delimiter during import).

JSON vs TSV

Frequently Asked Questions