TSV to JSON Converter

You selected a block of cells in Google Sheets, copied it, and now you have tab-separated text sitting on your clipboard. This converter turns that pasted block straight into a JSON array, one object per row.

Where TSV data usually comes from

Almost nobody sits down to type a .tsv file by hand. It shows up because a spreadsheet, a database export, or a command-line tool such as mysql in batch mode defaults to tab-separated output. Recognising that origin matters, because it means the data is usually clean and regularly shaped — a spreadsheet does not produce ragged rows the way a hand-edited CSV sometimes does.

The trade-off is that TSV rarely gets the careful escaping rules CSV has. If a field genuinely contains a tab or a line break, some TSV exporters handle it correctly and others simply do not, so it is worth checking the row count in the output matches what you expected.

Decisions the converter makes on your behalf

• Whether the first row is a header supplying key names, or genuine data — get this wrong and every value shifts by one row.
• Whether a column of 0 and 1 values should become the numbers 0 and 1, or the booleans false and true.
• Whether a blank cell becomes an empty string, null, or is omitted from the object entirely.
• Whether a value like 0501 stays a string or gets read as the number 501, silently dropping the leading zero.
• How trailing empty columns, common in a spreadsheet export, are treated — kept as empty fields or trimmed away.

Why this is not just "CSV with a different key"

Because the quoting rules differ, a TSV parser and a CSV parser are not interchangeable even though they solve a similar problem. A CSV parser expects to find quoted fields and doubled quote marks; feeding it tab-separated data with no quoting at all can work by accident for simple rows and break silently on anything unusual. Use a parser that actually expects tabs.

TSV to JSON questions