Tab-separated values

Tab-separated values
Filename extension.tsv, .tab
Internet media type
text/tab-separated-values
Uniform Type Identifier (UTI)public.tab-separated-values-text
UTI conformationpublic.delimited-values-text
Developed byUniversity of Minnesota Internet Gopher Team

Internet Assigned Numbers Authority
Initial releasec. June 1993 (1993-06)
Type of formatDelimiter-separated values format
Container fordatabase information organized as field separated lists
StandardIANA 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). 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.