TSV Format
TSV (Tab-Separated Values) is a text format separating fields with tabs; it is the tab dialect of CSV, used for data exchange and the clipboard.
Purpose
To use tab separation when fields contain commas but no tabs, avoiding the need for quotes—common in database exports and the clipboard.
Mechanism
Each line is a record with fields separated by \t and lines by \r\n, following the RFC 4180 tab dialect. Fields containing tabs or line breaks still require quoting or escaping.
Use cases
- Database exports
- Clipboard data exchange
- NLP corpus formats