Convert TSV to ASCII Table Online

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

From

From a page

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.

Edit

Paste or upload something above and it will appear here.

ToDataMarkupDocumentsCodeSchemasImages

Header rowDetect numbers

The output will appear here once there is a table to convert.

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 ASCII Table is

An ASCII table is a grid drawn with plus signs, dashes and pipes. It renders identically in every terminal and every font.

Command line output, code comments, plain text email and commit messages.

What changes when you convert TSV to ASCII Table

The tab is unambiguous, so there is no delimiter to guess. This is the most reliable of the delimited formats to read.

Column widths are measured in display columns rather than characters, so a table with CJK or emoji content still lines up.

What carries over from TSV to ASCII Table

TSV records 2 things about a table that ASCII table has no way to hold.

A line break inside a cell ends the row in ASCII table, so line breaks are replaced rather than carried through.

ASCII table marks its header cells differently from its data cells, so the first row is written with that marker.

TSV can be read one record at a time. ASCII table has to be complete before it means anything, so the whole table is held in memory while it is written and a file that gets cut off part way through is not partly usable - it is unusable.

The identifier 007 comes out of the ASCII Table 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 ASCII Table file goes wrong.

The quotes around Jonah "Jo" Pryce are left as a plain quote character in the ASCII Table.

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.

TSV 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

ASCII Table 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 TSV to ASCII Table?

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

One of my cells has a line break in it - what happens?

A line break would end the row in ASCII table, so it is replaced instead of carried through. The rest of the cell stays where it belongs.

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.