Tab-separated values

Tab-separated values (TSV) is a plain text data format for storing tabular data where the values of a record are separated by a tab character and each record is a line (i.e. newline separated).^[3] The TSV format is a form of delimiter-separated values (DSV) and is similar to the commonly-used comma-separated values (CSV) format.

Tab-separated values
Filename extension	.tsv, .tab[1]
Internet media type	text/tab-separated-values
Uniform Type Identifier (UTI)	public.tab-separated-values-text[2]
UTI conformation	public.delimited-values-text[2]
Developed by	University of Minnesota Internet Gopher Team Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
Initial release	c. June 1993; 32 years ago (1993-06)
Type of format	Delimiter-separated values format
Container for	database information organized as field separated lists
Standard	IANA MIME type

TSV is a relatively simple format and is widely supported for data exchange by software that generally deals with tabular data. For example, a TSV file might be used to transfer information from a database to a spreadsheet.

Example

The following are records of the Iris flower data set in TSV format. Since a tab is not a printable character (is invisible), an arrow (→) is used for demonstration here to denote a tab character.

Sepal length→Sepal width→Petal length→Petal width→Species
5.1→3.5→1.4→0.2→I. setosa
4.9→3.0→1.4→0.2→I. setosa
4.7→3.2→1.3→0.2→I. setosa
4.6→3.1→1.5→0.2→I. setosa
5.0→3.6→1.4→0.2→I. setosa

The following is the same data rendered as a table.

Sepal length	Sepal width	Petal length	Petal width	Species
5.1	3.5	1.4	0.2	I. setosa
4.9	3.0	1.4	0.2	I. setosa
4.7	3.2	1.3	0.2	I. setosa
4.6	3.1	1.5	0.2	I. setosa
5.0	3.6	1.4	0.2	I. setosa

Delimiter collision

As a form of delimiter collision, if a field (record value) contained a tab character, the data format would become meaningless since tabs were no longer only used between fields. To prevent this situation, the IANA media type standard for TSV simply disallows a tab within a field. Similarly, a value cannot contain a line terminator.^[4] To represent a value with an embedded tab or line terminator character, a commonly-used mechanism is to replace the character with the corresponding escape sequence as shown in the following table.^[5][6]

sequence	represents
\t	tab
\n	line feed
\r	carriage return
\\	backslash

Another commonly-used convention, borrowed from CSV (RFC 4180), is to enclose a value that contains a tab or line terminator character in double quotes.^[7][8]

Line terminator

As for any text file, the character(s) used for line terminator varies. On a Microsoft-based system, normally it's a carriage return (CR) and line feed (LF) sequence. On a Unix-based system, it's just LF. The de-facto specification^[9] uses the term "EOL" which is an ambiguous term like line terminator and newline. Software often is designed to either handle the line terminator for the platform on which it runs or to handle either terminator.