What is a TSV file and how do you open one?

A TSV file stores a table as plain text, usually with a .tsv or .tab extension. Each line is a row, and a tab character separates each value from the next:

id	country	price
1	NL	20
2	US	35

You often have TSV without saving a file: copying a range of cells in Excel or Google Sheets puts tab-separated text on the clipboard.

The IANA registration for text/tab-separated-values is short:

• Each record is one line.
• Fields are separated by a tab character.
• A field can't contain a tab.
• The first line holds the field names, separated by tabs.
• Every record has the same number of fields.

Because a field can never contain the separator, the definition needs no quoting or escaping: every tab starts a new column. If a value does contain a tab, a reader that splits on tabs sees an extra field and the rest of the row shifts one column to the right. rows.page detects the tab delimiter and the header row automatically, so you don't set either.

Tabs rarely appear in names, addresses or product descriptions, while commas often do, so TSV sidesteps most quoting problems. CSV handles those values by wrapping them in double quotes, as RFC 4180 describes.

rows.page

1. Drop a .tsv or .tab file on rows.page. Tab-separated data saved as .txt or .csv works too.
2. Or click Paste data and paste cells copied from Excel or Google Sheets; they open as a table.
3. For a public file, put its URL after rows.page/, for example https://rows.page/https://example.com/data.tsv.

DuckDB-WASM reads the file in your browser, and nothing is uploaded unless you press Share. A tab holds up to 1.5 GB; a bigger TSV loads partially with the note "Loaded the first N rows: the file is X, more than the browser can hold." A TSV that is not valid UTF-8 is read as Latin-1, but any byte from 0x80 to 0x9F, such as a Windows-1252 euro sign or curly quote, stops it from opening with "Couldn't open this data"; re-save the file as UTF-8.

The Columns panel shows each column's type, distinct count, share of empty values, min and max, and a histogram or the top 10 values. Filter with country:NL or price:>20, or run SQL against the table data. rows.page doesn't edit cells or let you override the detected delimiter.

Excel

Go to Data > From Text/CSV, pick the file and choose Tab as the delimiter. Excel keeps 15 significant digits, so longer numeric IDs lose digits unless you import that column as Text.

Google Sheets

Go to File > Import, upload the file and set the separator type to Tab. A spreadsheet holds up to 20 million cells or 100 MB.

1. Open the TSV file on rows.page.
2. Optionally filter, sort, hide columns or run SQL; Export always writes the current view.
3. Open Export and pick CSV.

You get a comma-delimited UTF-8 file with a header row and no BOM. Cells that start with =, +, -, @, a tab or a carriage return get a leading apostrophe so spreadsheets don't run them as formulas. Filtered views export every matching row, SQL results up to 1,000,000 rows, and there is no option to pick another delimiter, encoding or BOM.

On the command line, DuckDB does the same conversion and quotes any value that contains a comma:

COPY (SELECT * FROM read_csv('data.tsv', delim = '\t')) TO 'data.csv' (HEADER, DELIMITER ',');