TSV to CSV Converter
Tabs to commas. One character difference, surprisingly annoying.
What this does
Paste tab-separated text, get comma-separated text. Each tab becomes a comma, and any cell that would break the CSV gets wrapped in double quotes. Values don't change. No type guessing, no trimming, so 007 stays 007.
To convert a TSV file to CSV, open it in a text editor (or select the cells in a spreadsheet and copy them), paste into the box, and click Convert. Copy the result, or hit Download for output.csv.
A price list with commas and quotes in it goes in:
Product Price Notes
Widget, large $1,200.00 Ships in 2 days
Gadget 15 Says "new!" on the boxAnd comes out as:
Product,Price,Notes
"Widget, large","$1,200.00",Ships in 2 days
Gadget,15,"Says ""new!"" on the box"Three cells needed quotes. Two had commas. The third had quotes of its own, which got doubled.
Common use cases
Pasting from a spreadsheet. Copy a range in Excel or Google Sheets and the clipboard holds TSV, not CSV. Convert it here before it goes somewhere that expects commas.
Command-line and database output. mysql --batch prints tab-separated rows, and plenty of public datasets ship as .tsv files.
Feeding tools that only accept CSV, which describes most import screens on the internet.
Things to know
The delimiter is always a tab. If your "TSV" has spaces between columns instead, each line stays one cell.
Quotes follow CSV rules. Excel wraps a multi-line cell in double quotes when you copy it, and the parser reads that correctly, so line breaks inside cells survive. A quote in the middle of a cell, like 5" screen, passes through and gets escaped. A cell that starts with a quote is treated as a quoted cell, though. If text follows the closing quote, as in "Big" Tony, you get "Trailing quote on quoted field is malformed". An opening quote that never closes gets "Quoted field unterminated".
Rows don't have to match. A short row stays short and a long row stays long. Empty cells stay empty, blank lines are dropped, and a leading byte order mark is stripped. Lines end with CRLF.
Values starting with = pass through untouched. Open the CSV in a spreadsheet and they run as formulas.
Privacy
Tabs turn into commas inside your browser. The rows you copied out of that spreadsheet don't go anywhere else.
Questions
How do I convert TSV to CSV in Excel?
Open the .tsv in Excel, check that the columns split on tabs, then use Save As and pick CSV. It works, but Excel reformats as it opens: leading zeros vanish and date-looking text turns into dates. Pasting here keeps every cell exactly as written.
What's the difference between TSV and CSV?
The separator. TSV puts a tab between cells, CSV puts a comma. Tabs almost never show up inside real data, so TSV rarely needs quoting. Commas turn up in prices and addresses constantly, so CSV quotes a lot.
Why is my output all in one column?
Your input has no tabs. Text copied from a PDF, a web page, or a terminal often has spaces where the tabs used to be. Each line then becomes a single cell, quoted if it contains a comma. Put real tabs back between the columns and convert again.
How large a TSV file can I convert?
Up to 500,000 characters per paste. Past that, the tool refuses rather than freezing your tab. There's no file upload, so split bigger files and convert them in pieces.