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TSV and CSV guides

Short, specific writing about tables in text files and the trouble they cause.

  1. 01What is a TSV file?A plain-text table where one character does all the work — and the reasons that character is a tab.
  2. 02TSV vs CSV — which should you use?They do the same job. They fail differently, and the difference decides which one you want.
  3. 03How to fix a broken TSV fileFive failures account for almost every broken tab-separated file. Each one looks different, and each one has a specific repair.
  4. 04Why Excel keeps changing my dataExcel does not corrupt your file at random. It applies four specific conversions the moment it reads a cell, and knowing which one you hit tells you whether the value is recoverable.
  5. 05How to open a CSV without breaking itExcel can open a delimited file without touching a single value. It just will not do it by default, and the option that matters is three clicks from where nobody looks.
  6. 06Invisible characters, and why your lookup failsTwo values look identical on screen and refuse to match. There are about a dozen characters that can cause it, and none of them draw anything.
  7. 07CRLF vs LF — line endings in data filesLine endings are the one difference between two files that are otherwise byte-identical, and the one nobody looks at until a lookup fails on the last column only.
  8. 08Translation files in spreadsheetsAlmost every localisation hand-off is a table with a key, a source language and one column per target. The shape is obvious once you have seen it, and so are the four ways it goes wrong.
  9. 09How to check translation completenessA column with no empty cells is not a finished translation. Counting what is actually done takes three checks, and one of them has to learn what normal looks like first.