JSON to TSV Converter

Why convert JSON to TSV instead of CSV

A JSON to TSV conversion is the quickest route from an API payload to a spreadsheet you can paste into. When you copy tab-separated text and paste it into Excel, Google Sheets or LibreOffice, every value lands in its own cell without an import dialog, because tabs are what those apps put on the clipboard themselves.

Tabs also have a practical advantage over commas: they almost never occur inside real data. Names with commas, prices formatted as 1,299 and sentences stay unquoted, which keeps the output easy to read and easy to process with command-line tools.

Example

[
  { "sku": "A-1", "title": "Mug, blue", "size": { "h": 10, "w": 8 } },
  { "sku": "B-2", "title": "Cup; small", "size": { "h": 7 } }
]

Output (columns separated by tab characters):

sku	title	size.h	size.w
A-1	Mug, blue	10	8
B-2	Cup; small	7

Neither the comma nor the semicolon needed quotes. The nested size object became two columns, and the missing width of the second record is simply an empty cell.

Options

The TSV page keeps the choice small, because the delimiter is fixed:

• Include header row – writes the column names first. Untick it when you paste below existing headers.
• Flatten nested objects – nested keys become dot columns such as size.h, and array items become tags.0, tags.1. When it is off, each nested value is placed in one cell as JSON text.

Records are located the same way as on the CSV page: a wrapper such as {"items": [ … ]} is unwrapped, and the union of all keys forms the columns.

When a value contains a tab, a quote or a line break

TSV has no official escaping rule, so the converter follows the CSV convention: a value containing a tab, a double quote or a line break is wrapped in double quotes, and inner quotes are doubled. say "hi" becomes "say ""hi""". Spreadsheet apps understand this when you paste.

Simple tab splitters do not. Tools such as cut -f or awk -F'\t' will see the quotes as part of the value, and a multi-line value will break the row in two. If your data goes to such a tool, replace tabs and newlines in the JSON values before converting.

TSV, CSV or Excel?

• Use TSV for the clipboard, for shell pipelines and for bulk-edit forms that ask you to paste rows.
• Use JSON to CSV when a program or import wizard expects a .csv file or a specific delimiter, or when you need every field quoted.
• Use JSON to Excel when you want a file that opens with numbers, booleans and text already typed.

To turn edited rows back into JSON, paste them into TSV to JSON.

Privacy

The conversion happens in your browser without uploading your data. Only Load URL and Save & Share pass content through our server.