Convert CSV to TSV

CSV uses commas to separate fields and standardises quoting via RFC 4180 so cells can contain commas or newlines. TSV uses tab characters (U+0009) and – in its strict IANA form – disallows tabs and newlines inside cells entirely. There is no RFC for TSV; “standard TSV” is really several competing conventions.

No. RFC 4180 defined double-quote quoting for CSV in 2005; TSV never got an equivalent. That’s why this tool makes you choose an embedded-tab / embedded-newline policy: the source CSV might legitimately contain them inside quoted cells, but strict TSV can’t hold them. The tool warns you (in stats) whenever it has to fix one.

It replaces each literal tab character inside a cell with the two-character sequence t. This matches Postgres COPY ... FORMAT text and the IANA text/tab-separated-values dialect. The downstream tool has to decode t back to a real tab on its end. Same for n for embedded newlines.

When the downstream tool won’t decode escape sequences – e.g., pasting into Excel, Google Sheets, or a plain text editor. A space preserves readability at the cost of strict round-trip fidelity. Use “Strip” only when you’re sure the whitespace character was noise in the first place.

Only when no CSV cell contains a tab, a newline, or a delimiter that your parser can’t handle. With the Escape policy plus RFC 4180 parsing it’s lossless in practice as long as the decoder also understands t/n. Simple-mode + Keep-policy is the most ambiguous combination and can silently corrupt structure.

Because cells typed or pasted into spreadsheets commonly contain commas but almost never contain tab characters. Tab is a safer “can I assume this is a column break?” signal. When you copy a cell range from a spreadsheet, the system clipboard actually holds the selection as TSV, which is why it pastes cleanly into other tables.

Under RFC 4180, the outer quotes are decoded (not output). A cell like "Smith, Jr." becomes the literal text Smith, Jr. with one tab separator before and after it. Internal "" escapes are also decoded to single ". TSV doesn’t need quoting because its delimiter is unambiguous.

CSV-to-TSV produces a parseable, tab-delimited file that tools can still read as a table. CSV-to-text strips structure entirely and gives you prose joined by whatever character you pick. If you want a file you can feed into a database or reopen as a table, pick this tool; if you want readable free-form text, pick CSV-to-text.

Yes – use a TSV-to-CSV decoder (or feed the result through any tool that parses TSV and outputs CSV). As long as you used the Escape policy and the decoder supports t / n decoding, a round-trip should be exact.

Yes – 100% client-side JavaScript. Your CSV is never uploaded, never logged, never stored. Load the page once and it keeps working offline indefinitely.