Tablizer

Convert Plain Text to TSV Online

Paste a Plain Text table below, edit it if you need to, and get TSV back. The conversion runs in your browser, so nothing is uploaded, there is no size limit and there is no signup.

From

The only part of this site that uses a server. The address is sent to it so the page can be fetched, because a browser is not allowed to fetch someone else's page itself. Your own files are never involved.

Nothing here is uploaded. The parsing happens on this page.
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Paste or upload something above and it will appear here.
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The output will appear here once there is a table to convert.

What Plain Text is

Plain text here means columns lined up with spaces, the way a command line tool prints a table.

Terminal output, log files, fixed-width exports from older systems.

What TSV is

TSV is CSV with tabs instead of commas. Because tabs almost never appear inside a value, quoting is rarely needed and the files are easier to read by eye.

Bioinformatics, log processing, and anyone who has copied a block of cells out of a spreadsheet: the clipboard format is TSV.

What changes when you convert Plain Text to TSV

Two shapes are handled. If the same character positions are blank on every line, those gutters are treated as column boundaries, so values containing single spaces stay intact. Otherwise the lines are split on runs of whitespace.

Pick TSV over CSV when your values contain commas. Pasting the result straight into a spreadsheet fills the cells correctly with no import dialog.

What carries over from Plain Text to TSV

TSV can express everything plain text holds about a table, so this conversion is about shape rather than loss.

plain text and TSV can express the same things about a table, so nothing is lost here - only rewritten. Columns are held apart by spacing alone, so the alignment is the structure. TSV separates columns with tabs and agrees on no quoting convention, so a tab or a newline inside a value has no safe representation.

That makes this a change of notation rather than of content: the same values, the same columns, the same order, written with the markers TSV expects instead of the ones plain text uses.

The identifier 007 comes out of the TSV as 007. Reading it as a number would have made it 7, and an id that changes value is worse than one that stays text.

The role "Analyst, data" survives with its comma, in one cell rather than split across two. That is the first thing to check in any converted table, and the usual place a TSV file goes wrong.

The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are doubled, which is how the delimited formats escape a quote in the TSV.

A worked example

Three rows of staff data, with an identifier that has a leading zero, a value containing a comma, a value containing quotes and one blank cell. Those are the four places formats disagree, so they are the four places to look.

Plain Text in
id   name              role           started     hours
007  Halima Yusuf      Analyst, data  2024-03-15  38.5
012  Jonah "Jo" Pryce  Engineer       2025-11-02
104  Wei Chen          Manager        2023-06-30  40
TSV out
id	name	role	started	hours
007	Halima Yusuf	Analyst, data	2024-03-15	38.5
012	"Jonah ""Jo"" Pryce"	Engineer	2025-11-02	
104	Wei Chen	Manager	2023-06-30	40

Questions

How do I convert Plain Text to TSV?

Paste your Plain Text into the box above or drop the file onto it. Check the table in the grid, then copy or download the TSV from the output panel. It takes one step and the data never leaves your browser.

Is there a limit on file size?

No. The work happens on your own machine, so the limit is your machine's memory rather than an upload cap. A file with tens of thousands of rows converts in a second or two.

Is my data uploaded anywhere?

No. The parsing and generating are done by JavaScript running on this page. You can watch the network tab while you convert and see that nothing is sent.

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