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TSV → CSV

Convert TSV to CSV

The two formats differ by one character, which is exactly why the conversion goes wrong so often. Every cell that already contains a comma has to be quoted on the way out, and a tool that forgets turns one column into two without saying a word.

How to do it

  1. Open the editor and drop your .tsv file onto it, or paste the rows straight from wherever you copied them.
  2. Check the review panel. Cells holding a comma, a quote or a line break are the ones that will need escaping, and they are listed before you export anything.
  3. Choose Export, pick CSV, and set the line ending you need — LF for anything Unix-shaped, CRLF if a Windows tool is going to read it.
  4. Save. The file is written by your browser; it never travels.

Do it in the editor

What usually goes wrong

  • Commas inside cells

    A product name like "Mug, ceramic" is one cell in a TSV and two in a naive CSV. The export quotes it instead, and doubles any quote character already inside.

  • Excel and the byte order mark

    Excel reads a UTF-8 CSV as Latin-1 unless the file starts with a byte order mark, which is how accented characters become mojibake. If Excel is the destination, leave the mark on.

  • The trailing newline

    Some parsers treat a final empty line as an extra empty row. The export keeps whatever the original had, and lets you change it deliberately.

Semicolon-separated files — what Excel produces in locales that use a comma for decimals — are handled the same way. Pick the delimiter at export.