CSV / TSV
Preview comma or tab-separated text as a table and convert it to JSON.
| name | role | city |
|---|---|---|
| Alice | engineer | Seoul |
| Bob | designer | Tokyo |
| Carol | product | Berlin |
Tips
- Delimiter is auto-detected by default; override if needed.
- Untick Header row if your file has no header.
- Download JSON emits an array of
{header: value}objects.
The CSV / TSV preview
CSV (comma-separated values) and TSV (tab-separated values) are the lowest common denominator for tabular data. Almost every spreadsheet, database, and analytics tool can produce or consume them. The downside is that the format is informally specified — the rules for quoting, escaping, and line endings vary just enough between tools that real-world files often need a sanity check before being trusted.
Quoting and escaping in practice
- A field that contains a comma, a newline, or a double quote must be wrapped in double quotes.
- Inside a quoted field, a literal double quote is written as two double quotes:
"She said ""hi""". - Excel-style CSV uses CRLF line endings; Unix tooling usually uses LF. Most parsers accept both, but a strict importer may not.
- A leading BOM (byte-order mark) is invisible in some editors but breaks the first column header when imported elsewhere.
When to use TSV instead
TSV is just CSV with tabs as the delimiter, and it has one practical advantage: tabs almost never appear inside text fields, so quoting is rarely needed. If you are exporting free-text columns (chat messages, log lines, product descriptions), TSV usually round-trips more cleanly than CSV.
Converting to JSON
Once your delimited file parses as a clean table, the JSON conversion produces an array of objects keyed by the first row. This is the shape that most data-loading scripts expect, so it is a quick bridge from a spreadsheet export to anything you would write in code.