The .tsv file.
- Delimiter
- A tab character
- Quoting
- Rarely needed, because tabs seldom appear in values
- Encoding
- Undeclared, like CSV
- Common from
- Database clients, scientific tools, some ad platforms
- Read here as
- Direct, as delimited text
- Status
- Ready
- Fidelity
- Read directly
- Largest file
- 25 MB free, 250 MB once a project is bought
What it actually is
Read as delimited text.
A TSV separates fields with a tab character. Because tabs almost never appear inside a value, the quoting rules that make CSV parsing genuinely difficult are rarely needed, and a file can usually be split on the delimiter with no further thought.
It is the default export of a great many scientific and bioinformatics tools for exactly that reason, and it is what you get from most database command-line clients.
The cost is invisibility. A tab and a run of spaces look identical, so a file damaged by a text editor that converts one to the other gives no visual warning at all.
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The analysis runs before there is anything to pay for.
You see what it found, and the evidence behind it, first.
No account needed to start. You only pay when you like what you see.
What goes wrong, and what is done about it
2 named failures, each with the repair.
An editor that turned tabs into spaces
Many editors expand tabs on save. The file then has no delimiter at all, every row is one field, and nothing about it looks different.
What is done: Neither space-delimited nor fixed-width is a candidate here, so a file whose tabs have become spaces reads as a single column. That is the signature to look for, and the answer is to re-export from the source rather than repair it by hand.
Embedded newlines with no quoting to protect them
Because TSV rarely quotes, a value containing a line break splits the row, and the columns after it shift left for the rest of the file.
What is done: A row that comes out wider than the header is truncated to the header's width. Because TSV rarely quotes, that is a real risk here, and the file is worth re-exporting with quoting turned on.
Questions people ask
About this format, not about the product.
Is TSV better than CSV?
For anything containing commas in its text, yes, because the delimiter collision is what most often breaks a CSV. For long-term storage, Parquet beats both, since it carries types.
Do I need to say it is tab-separated?
No. Comma, semicolon, tab and pipe are tried in that order, and the first one that yields more than a single column is the one used. Nothing has to be declared anywhere.
Can I mix TSV and Excel files in one project?
Yes, and the format each one arrived in makes no difference to how it is read. The analysis itself runs on a single table, the largest, so a TSV export and an .xlsx workbook are not combined into one. Where the two look related, that is reported as a candidate relationship with a confidence.
Keep reading
The jobs people do with this file, and the formats beside it.