TSV File Format (.tsv)
A TSV file holds a table as one line of text per row, with values separated by tab characters instead of the commas CSV uses.
TSV at a glance#
| Full name | Tab-Separated Values |
|---|---|
| File extension | .tsv |
| Category | Data Files |
| Developer | University of Minnesota Internet Gopher Team |
| First released | 1993 |
| MIME types | text/tab-separated-values |
| Compression | Uncompressed |
| FileFlip support | FileFlip reads and writes this format |
What a .tsv file can hold#
These are the things a TSV file either supports or does not, and they are what decides whether a conversion keeps everything or quietly drops something.
| Human readable | Yes |
|---|---|
| Comments | No |
| Schema or validation | No |
Strengths and limitations of TSV#
What TSV does well
- Values almost never need quoting, because a tab character rarely appears inside real-world data
- Simpler to parse correctly than CSV, since there's usually no delimiter-inside-a-value case to handle
- Widely used in bioinformatics and data pipelines where fields are expected to be delimiter-clean
Where TSV falls short
- No formal specification beyond an informal IANA media type registration from 1993, so escaping rules for a stray tab or newline vary by implementation
- A tab character is invisible in most editors, so a misaligned column is hard to spot by eye
- No type system, the same as CSV, so every value is text until something downstream decides otherwise
- Fewer tools default to TSV than CSV, so it sometimes needs an explicit delimiter flag to open correctly
Use TSV instead of CSV when the data itself might contain commas, since tabs are rare enough in real text that quoting is usually unnecessary.
Convert TSV to CSV when the destination tool defaults to comma parsing and doesn't offer a delimiter option.
How to open a .tsv file#
A .tsv file opens in the programs below, grouped by the platform you are on. If you would rather not install anything, FileFlip converts TSV into a format your machine already opens, and it does it in the browser tab rather than on a server.
| Platform | Programs that open it |
|---|---|
| Windows | Microsoft Excel, Notepad++ |
| macOS | Numbers, Microsoft Excel |
| Linux | LibreOffice Calc |
| Web | FileFlip, Google Sheets |
TSV questions people ask#
What's the difference between TSV and CSV?
TSV separates values with a tab character instead of the comma CSV uses. Because tabs almost never appear inside ordinary text, TSV files usually need no quoting at all, while CSV has to wrap any value containing a comma in double quotes.
Is there an official TSV specification?
No. TSV has only an informal IANA media type registration, text/tab-separated-values, submitted by the University of Minnesota's Internet Gopher team in 1993, and it leaves details like how to escape a literal tab inside a value unspecified. Different tools handle that case differently, which is the same gap CSV has with RFC 4180, just with less documentation around it.
Does converting TSV to CSV lose any data?
Not usually, as long as none of the values already contain a comma. If a value does contain a comma, the converter has to wrap it in double quotes to keep the row from splitting incorrectly, which TSV's tab delimiter never required in the first place.
Converting TSV files#
Convert TSV to another format
Convert another format to TSV
Every conversion runs inside your browser. The file is read from your disk, the work happens on your own machine, and nothing is uploaded. How FileFlip works names the engine behind each family and how to verify that for yourself.