CSV to TSV

A find-and-replace of , with a tab breaks any field that contains a comma, such as "Acme, Inc." or a street address. This converter parses the CSV properly first, so commas inside quoted fields stay part of the value, and then writes each row with tabs between fields.

Once the data is tab-separated, most of those quotes are no longer needed, because commas have no special meaning in TSV. The output only quotes a field when it contains a tab, a double quote, or a line break.

Column order, header names, and every value are kept as text, including leading zeros and blank cells. Blank lines and rows where every cell is empty are dropped. Duplicate header names get a suffix (name_1) so each column stays distinct.

Lines end with Windows-style CRLF (\r\n), which spreadsheet apps and most command-line tools accept. If a Unix tool shows ^M at line ends, strip the carriage returns with tr -d '\r'.

TSV is useful when values often contain commas: free-text notes, addresses, or numbers formatted with thousands separators. It is also what you get when you copy a range from Excel or Google Sheets, so TSV pastes back into a spreadsheet cleanly. Tools such as cut, awk -F'\t', and many bioinformatics pipelines expect it. Our guide CSV vs TSV vs JSON compares the formats in more detail.