Convert TSV to Plain Text Online

Paste a TSV table below, edit it if you need to, and get Plain Text 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 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 changes when you convert TSV to Plain Text

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

Columns are padded to the widest value. Width is counted in display columns rather than characters, so a table containing Chinese, Japanese or Korean text still lines up: those glyphs occupy two columns in a monospace font.

What carries over from TSV to Plain Text

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

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

The identifier 007 comes out of the Plain Text 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 Plain Text file goes wrong.

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

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

Plain Text 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 Plain Text?

Paste your TSV into the box above or drop the file onto it. Check the table in the grid, then copy or download the Plain Text 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 plain text, 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.