TSV to CSV Converter

Convert TSV to CSV without breaking fields that contain commas

Tab-separated values are what you get whenever you copy a block of cells out of Excel, Google Sheets or Numbers, and they are the native export format of plenty of database clients and analytics tools. The trouble starts when the next step expects comma-separated values — an importer, a REST endpoint, a COPY statement or a teammate's script. A naive find-and-replace of tabs for commas quietly corrupts any cell that already contains a comma, a quote or a line break. This converter parses the input properly and re-serialises it as RFC 4180-correct CSV, quoting only the fields that need it, so a value like HDMI, 2m survives as one cell instead of splitting into two.

Why a real parser matters

Delimited formats look trivial until a field contains the delimiter. The converter walks the text character by character, tracking whether it is inside a quoted field, so embedded commas, escaped quotes ("") and even newlines inside a quoted cell are handled correctly rather than treated as row or column breaks. CRLF and LF line endings are both recognised and normalised. The result is output you can hand to a strict parser without the off-by-one column errors that plague search-and-replace conversions, which is the whole reason the dedicated tool exists.

Where TSV and CSV each make sense

TSV is the friendlier clipboard format because tabs almost never appear inside real data, so quoting is rarely needed and the raw text stays readable. CSV is the lingua franca for importers and APIs, but it pays for that ubiquity with quoting rules that trip people up. A good habit is to keep your canonical file in whichever format your tooling reads natively and convert on the way in or out, rather than maintaining two copies that can drift apart.

Clean the data, then load it

Conversion is only the formatting step — the values themselves often still need work. Strip accidental repeats with the Duplicate Line Remover before you import, and when you are reshaping a dump rather than just re-delimiting it, the Text ⇄ CSV Converter handles custom delimiters and pipe-separated text. If the rows are headed for a database, the CSV to SQL Import tool turns them into INSERT statements, and the CSV ⇄ JSON Converter is there when the destination is an API rather than a spreadsheet.

Production checklist

Confirm the header row survived the conversion and that the column count is identical on every line — a single stray tab or unbalanced quote in the source is the usual culprit when an import rejects the file. Decide how empty cells should appear, since a trailing delimiter and a quoted empty string mean the same thing to a human but not always to a parser. Keep a tiny sample that deliberately includes a comma, a quote and a multi-line cell so the awkward cases are exercised every time, and redact anything sensitive before the CSV lands in a ticket or pull request.

Further reading

For the wider context, CSV vs TSV: differences and when to use each weighs the two delimiters, while CSV quoting and escaping explained covers the RFC 4180 rules that decide when a field needs quotes.