Change TSV Delimiter
Re-delimit a file: read it with one separator, write it with another. The two cases that bring people here are Excel in a European locale, which expects semicolons rather than commas in CSV, and pipe-delimited files, which are common in data warehouses precisely because pipes are rarer in text than either commas or tabs. Quoting is applied on output only where the new delimiter makes it necessary.
How to use
- Paste or drop the file. Input is read as tab-separated unless you tell it otherwise.
- Pick the output delimiter — or choose custom and type any single character.
- Decide about quoting: with it on, fields containing the new delimiter are quoted RFC 4180-style; with it off, output is bare and a field containing the delimiter will break the file.
- Copy or download.
Choosing a delimiter
Tab is the best default for data that contains prose, because tabs almost never occur in text. Semicolon is what Excel expects in locales where the comma is the decimal separator — a file that opens with every row in column A usually just needs this. Pipe is the warehouse convention and survives most text unquoted. Comma is the most widely accepted and the most likely to need quoting.What matters more than which you pick is whether the consumer knows: a delimited file carries no metadata about its own delimiter, which is the root cause of most "the import went into one column" problems.
Quoting is the real decision
If any field can contain the output delimiter, you need quoting on, and the consumer needs a parser that understands it. If the consumer is a naive splitter, quoting won't help — pick a delimiter that genuinely doesn't occur in the data, or escape the offending characters instead with escape tabs and newlines. Checking is quick: convert, then validate the result and confirm the column count didn't change.
FAQ
Can I use a multi-character delimiter?
No — one character. Multi-character separators (||, \t\t) aren't supported by most readers either, so they're rarely a good idea.
How do I convert to fixed-width instead?
Aligned text columns pads to visual columns. Note that it's for reading, not a parseable format.
Does it detect the input delimiter automatically?
No, deliberately. Detection guesses wrong on files where one delimiter appears inside quoted fields, and a silent wrong guess is worse than asking. Set the input separator yourself.
What about the decimal separator inside numbers?
Untouched — only field separators change. A European file using commas as decimal points needs find and replace in a column to convert 3,14 to 3.14.
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