Convert TSV to Avro Schema Online

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

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Nothing here is uploaded. The parsing happens on this page.
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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 Avro Schema is

An Avro schema describes a record: its name and its typed fields. It is the contract, not the data.

Kafka pipelines and anything in the Hadoop family.

What changes when you convert TSV to Avro Schema

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

Types are inferred per column from the values present. Any column with a gap in it becomes a union with null, because a reader rejects a record whose non-nullable field is missing.

What carries over from TSV to Avro Schema

One property of the TSV has no home in Avro, and it is worth knowing which before you convert.

Avro wants a type for each column, and TSV does not record one, so each column is typed from what its values look like. A column of digits that should stay text - a zip code, a phone number, a leading-zero id - is the usual thing to check afterwards.

Avro has no header row. The column names are repeated as keys on every record instead, which is why the result is bigger on disk than the table it came from.

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
Avro Schema out
{
  "type": "record",
  "name": "staff",
  "fields": [
    {
      "name": "id",
      "type": "long"
    },
    {
      "name": "name",
      "type": "string"
    },
    {
      "name": "role",
      "type": "string"
    },
    {
      "name": "started",
      "type": "string"
    },
    {
      "name": "hours",
      "type": [
        "null",
        "double"
      ]
    }
  ]
}

Questions

How do I convert TSV to Avro Schema?

Paste your TSV into the box above or drop the file onto it. Check the table in the grid, then copy or download the Avro Schema 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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