.TSV

Introduction

TSV is a plain text table like CSV, but with a tab character between fields instead of a comma. Because tabs rarely appear in ordinary text, most TSV files need no quoting at all, which makes them simple to write and to split with command-line tools.

It is common in science, especially in bioinformatics, and is what spreadsheets put on the clipboard when cells are copied. Some programs save the same format with a .tab or .txt extension.

Structure

A TSV file has no header bytes or magic number. Each record is one line, and the fields in it are separated by a single tab (byte 09). The first line usually names the columns. The IANA registration of the text/tab-separated-values type says every line has the same number of fields and that a field may not contain a tab or a line break.

Real files do not always follow that. Some programs quote fields that contain tabs, as CSV does, and others write escapes such as \t and \n instead, so a reader has to know which convention the writer used.

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