Introduction

TSV (Tab-Separated Values) is a plain-text tabular format similar to CSV but using tab characters as delimiters. It is commonly used in bioinformatics and data analysis pipelines.

Stencila supports bi-directional conversion between TSV files and Datatable nodes.

Usage

Use the .tsv file extension, or the --to tsv or --from tsv options, when converting to/from TSV e.g.

stencila convert table.smd table.tsv

Implementation

TSV support is implemented in the Rust crate codec-csv using the csv crate with a tab delimiter.

Limitations

Only Datatable nodes are supported. Other document node types cannot be converted to or from TSV.

All values are stored as text. Type information is lost on export and inferred on import.

Tab characters within field values require quoting, which not all tools handle consistently.