Quote TSV Columns
Add double quotes around cell values, either everywhere or only where the content requires it. Strictly, a TSV needs no quoting at all — the specification forbids tabs inside fields rather than providing an escape for them. In practice plenty of tools emit and expect CSV-style quoting in tab-separated files, and this is how you produce that form. The inverse is unquote columns.
How to use
- Paste or drop the file.
- Choose the mode — quote every cell, or only cells containing a tab, newline, or quote.
- Copy or download.
Which mode, and when
Only where needed is almost always right: it produces the minimal valid file, stays readable, and is what every RFC 4180 parser expects. Every cell is for consumers that treat an unquoted field as a different type — a few legacy loaders read bare digits as numbers and quoted digits as text, which is one way to stop an ID column losing its leading zeros on import. Quoting everything also makes trailing whitespace unambiguous.Internal quote characters are doubled ("") in both modes, which is the RFC 4180 convention and what keeps the output parseable.
Quoting versus escaping
These are two incompatible answers to the same problem, and it's worth knowing which your consumer speaks. Quoting requires the reader to implement a state machine; a naive tab-splitter ignores quotes and mis-reads the row. Escaping — writing \t and \n instead of the literal characters — keeps every line's tab count identical, so even cut -f2 is correct. PostgreSQL's COPY text format and mysql --batch both use escaping. If your consumer is strict, use escape tabs and newlines rather than this page.
FAQ
Does quoting change my data?
No. The quotes are syntax, and a parser strips them on read. Quoting everything and then unquoting returns exactly what you started with.
Will Excel handle quoted TSV?
Yes — Excel's importer understands quoting in tab-separated files. Whether it opens the file as columns at all depends on the extension and your locale; see BOM tools if characters come out garbled.
Are single quotes supported?
No — double quotes only, per RFC 4180. Single quotes have no special meaning in delimited formats and would confuse most parsers.
Why would a TSV need quoting at all?
Only because a field contains a tab or newline, which strict TSV forbids. If that's your situation, quoting is one fix and escaping is the more portable one.
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