Tab-separated values

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

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.

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.

References

1. U of Edin. Research Data Support Team. "Choose the best file formats". University of Edinburgh. § Formats we recommend. Retrieved 23 May 2023.
2. "tabSeparatedText". Apple Developer Documentation: Uniform Type Identifiers. Apple Inc . Retrieved 23 May 2023.
3. "How To Use Tab Separated Value (TSV) files". International Monetary Fund. Retrieved 1 February 2023.
4. Lindner 1993.
5. Dusek, Jason (6 May 2014). "Linear TSV: simple, line-oriented, tabular data". Data Protocols - Open Knowledge Foundation (v1.0β ed.). Archived from the original on 18 March 2023. Retrieved 6 May 2020.
6. Dolan, Stephen (1 November 2018). "jq Manual". jq. Retrieved 23 May 2023.
7. Miller, Rob (22 September 2015). Text Processing with Ruby: Extract Value from the Data That Surrounds You. Pragmatic Bookshelf. p. 94. ISBN   978-1-68050-492-7.
8. Giuseppini, Gabriele; Burnett, Mark (10 February 2005). Microsoft Log Parser Toolkit: A Complete Toolkit for Microsoft's Undocumented Log Analysis Tool. Elsevier. p. 311. ISBN   978-0-08-048939-1.
9. "IANA: text/tab-separated-values".

Sources

• "TSV — Tab-Separated Values" (11 February 2021 ed.). Library of Congress. fdd000533. Retrieved 23 May 2023.
• Lindner, Paul (June 1993). "text/tab-separated-values" [Definition of tab-separated-values (tsv)]. Assigned Media Types Registry. IANA. Minnesota: University of Minnesota Internet Gopher Team . Retrieved 23 May 2023.
• "How To Use Tab Separated Value (TSV) Files". Archived from the original on 12 January 2007. Retrieved 5 March 2017.

Further reading

• Jukka, Korpela (1 September 2000). "Tab Separated Values (TSV): a format for tabular data exchange" (12 February 2005 ed.). Retrieved 23 May 2023.
• Welinder, Morten (19 December 2012). "§14.2.3 — Text File Formats". The Gnumeric Manual (v1.12 ed.). Archived from the original on 30 November 2020. Retrieved 23 May 2023.