Why Choose Tabs Over Commas
Commas appear constantly inside real data — addresses, prices, prose. Every one of them has to be escaped by quoting the field, and every quoting bug turns into a shifted column. Tabs almost never appear inside a value, so TSV files tend to survive round-trips that break CSV. Spreadsheets also accept tab-separated text directly from the clipboard: paste and the columns split themselves, with no import wizard.
How to Export TSV
- Paste a JSON array of objects into the input pane.
- Set the delimiter dropdown to tab.
- Copy the output for a clipboard paste, or download it as a file.
Nested Objects Become Dot-Notation Columns
Nesting is flattened the same way as for CSV: {"user":{"city":"Oslo"}} yields a column named user.city. Every unique key across all objects becomes a column, and rows missing a key get an empty cell.
On the Command Line
# jq: header row, then tab-separated values
jq -r '(.[0] | keys_unsorted), (.[] | [.[]]) | @tsv' data.jsonWho this guide is for
- Paste JSON data straight into a spreadsheet without an import dialog
- Export records whose text fields contain commas, without quoting battles
- Feed a tab-delimited loader such as a bulk database import
- Copy a query result into a ticket or document as an aligned table