Tab-separated values
Tab-separated values 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. The TSV format is a form of delimiter-separated values and is similar to the commonly-used comma-separated values format.
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, an arrow is used for demonstration here to denote a tab character.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 |
If a text editor that supports Dynamic tab stops is used to view the contents of a TSV file, the layout will look like the table rendering just without cell borders and header row formatting.
Delimiter collision
As a form of delimiter collision, if a field 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. 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.| sequence | represents |
\t | tab |
\n | line feed |
\r | carriage return |
\\ | backslash |
Another commonly-used convention, borrowed from CSV, is to enclose a value that contains a tab or line terminator character in quotes.