Convert CSV to TSV Online
Convert CSV to TSV (tab-separated) free, in your browser.
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Use cases
CSV to TSV for databases and data science
Database import
PostgreSQL COPY and MySQL LOAD DATA use TSV for bulk loading millions of rows in seconds.
Spreadsheet clipboard
Excel and Google Sheets use TSV internally when copying cells. Paste TSV directly into any sheet.
Bioinformatics pipelines
BLAST, bedtools, samtools, and Galaxy tools use TSV as their standard output format.
100% private
Conversion runs in your browser. Your data is never sent to any server.
How it works
Three steps, no hassle
Upload or paste your CSV
Drag your .csv file or paste the content directly. No row limits, no signup.
Automatic conversion
Commas are replaced by tabs respecting RFC 4180 quoting. Processing happens in your browser.
Download or copy the TSV
Get the .tsv file ready for PostgreSQL, MySQL, Excel, or Google Sheets import.
FAQ
Got questions?
TSV (Tab-Separated Values) uses the tab character (\t, ASCII 9) as a column separator, while CSV uses a comma. The practical advantage of tabs is that they rarely appear in real data (names, addresses, descriptions), eliminating the need for field quoting. Commas, by contrast, appear frequently in narrative text, prices, and geographic coordinates, requiring RFC 4180 escape logic. This simplicity is why databases and scientific tools prefer TSV for bulk exports.
PostgreSQL supports COPY table FROM 'file.tsv' DELIMITER E'\t' CSV HEADER — the fastest bulk-load mechanism in the engine, capable of inserting millions of rows in seconds, far more efficient than row-by-row INSERT. MySQL offers the equivalent with LOAD DATA INFILE 'file.tsv' FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\t'. Converting your CSV to TSV lets you use these high-performance commands directly.
When you copy a cell range in Google Sheets or Excel, the clipboard receives the content as pure TSV: tab-separated columns, newline-separated rows. This means if you convert your CSV to TSV and copy the result, you can paste it directly into any spreadsheet cell and columns will distribute automatically. TSV is the native clipboard format of all major spreadsheet applications.
In CSV, fields with commas are wrapped in double quotes (RFC 4180). When converting to TSV, commas no longer need escaping because the tab is the new separator. Convertir.ai automatically removes the unnecessary wrapping quotes and only keeps double quoting for fields that contain literal tabs or line breaks, producing a clean, standard TSV.
Yes, TSV is the de facto standard in bioinformatics. BLAST (NCBI's Basic Local Alignment Search Tool) with -outfmt 6 produces 12-column TSV output. Bedtools, samtools, HMMER, GATK, and most Galaxy tools generate TSV by default. BED, GFF3, VCF, and GTF files are also TSV variants. If you receive sequencing data in CSV and need to process it with these tools, converting to TSV is the first step.
No, as long as field values do not contain literal tab characters. Convertir.ai detects this edge case: if a CSV field contains a tab, it warns you because that character would collide with the TSV separator. In practice, literal tabs in real data are extremely rare. All values, headers, and rows are preserved completely.
Convert CSV to TSV: databases, spreadsheets, and bioinformatics
CSV (Comma-Separated Values) and TSV (Tab-Separated Values) are the two most widely used plain-text tabular formats in computing, and the difference between them is a single character: the comma versus the tab (\t, ASCII code 9, Unicode U+0009). Despite their apparent simplicity, this difference has significant practical implications for how systems process, escape, and validate data. The comma is a character that frequently appears in narrative text, thousand-separator prices, geographic coordinates, enumerated lists, and names in last-name-first format. This ubiquity forces CSV to require a quoting and escape system defined by the IETF in RFC 4180 (October 2005): any field containing a comma, a double quote, or a line break must be wrapped in double quotes, and internal double quotes must be escaped by doubling them. This escape logic, while well-specified, introduces complexity in both the generation and parsing of CSV files. The tab character, by contrast, almost never appears in real textual data: not in names, product descriptions, postal addresses, or any other typical business database field. This practical absence makes TSV simpler to generate and parse without any escape logic in the vast majority of cases. When a TSV field does contain a literal tab character — something extremely rare in practice — it requires special treatment, but the case is so infrequent that many implementations do not even handle it. This structural simplicity is precisely why high-performance systems like PostgreSQL, MySQL, Apache Hive, and Amazon Redshift prefer TSV for bulk load operations, where parsing millions of rows with minimum overhead makes a measurable performance difference.
The most important use case for CSV-to-TSV conversion in production environments is large-scale relational database import. PostgreSQL provides the COPY command — the fastest ingestion mechanism in the engine, capable of differing by up to two orders of magnitude in throughput compared to row-by-row INSERT statements. It can load several million rows per minute by reading directly from a TSV file on disk, bypassing the client-protocol overhead and individual SQL statement processing entirely. The full syntax is COPY table_name FROM '/absolute/path/file.tsv' DELIMITER E'\t' CSV HEADER, where the CSV HEADER clause tells the engine that the first row contains column names rather than data. PostgreSQL also supports streaming from stdin for pipeline workflows: psql -c "COPY table FROM STDIN DELIMITER E'\t' CSV HEADER", which is particularly useful in shell pipelines where data is generated on the fly and piped directly into the database. MySQL offers the equivalent with LOAD DATA INFILE 'file.tsv' INTO TABLE table_name FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\t' LINES TERMINATED BY '\n' IGNORE 1 ROWS, using the same direct-from-disk loading mechanism. MariaDB shares this syntax. Big data tools like Apache Hive (CREATE EXTERNAL TABLE with ROW FORMAT DELIMITED FIELDS TERMINATED BY '\t'), Apache Spark (spark.read.option("sep","\t").csv("hdfs://path")), and Amazon Redshift (COPY table FROM 's3://bucket/file.tsv' DELIMITER '\t') all have native, optimized TSV support in their bulk load paths. The reason for this superior performance is structural: the TSV parser does not need to maintain state about whether it is inside a quoted field, which radically simplifies the parsing automaton and allows higher per-core processing throughput at scale.
A second high-value use case for CSV-to-TSV conversion is integration with the spreadsheet clipboard. When you select a cell range in Microsoft Excel (any version since Excel 97) or Google Sheets and copy with Ctrl+C (Cmd+C on Mac), the content placed in the operating system clipboard is not HTML or XML but pure TSV: columns separated by tab characters (U+0009), rows separated by carriage return plus line feed (CRLF, U+000D U+000A) on Windows or just LF (U+000A) on macOS and Linux. This behavior is documented in Microsoft's clipboard format specification for CF_TEXT and is observable in Google Sheets behavior. LibreOffice Calc and Apple Numbers use the same clipboard format for cell ranges, making TSV the universal paste-compatible format across all major spreadsheet applications. If you paste TSV content into a plain text editor and save it with a .tsv extension, you get a fully valid TSV file. In the reverse direction, converting your CSV to TSV and copying the result lets you paste data directly into any spreadsheet cell with automatic column distribution, bypassing the text import wizard entirely and saving significant time when working with recurring data imports. In bioinformatics and computational biology, TSV is the de facto interchange standard: BLAST's tabular output format (-outfmt 6) produces 12-column TSV with sequence alignments; bedtools, samtools view -o, HMMER (hmmscan --tblout), and GATK VariantAnnotator generate TSV by default; the BED, GFF3, VCF, and GTF formats are TSV variants with specification-defined columns; and most Galaxy environment tools use TSV as their interchange format. If you receive experimental data in CSV and need to process it with these bioinformatics tools, converting to TSV is the mandatory first step of the pipeline.