Do the TSV samples use quotation marks?

No. No field contains a tab, a line break or a quotation mark, so the files read the same way under every TSV convention.

Do the TSV and CSV samples hold the same data?

Yes. Both have the same twelve columns of fictional customer records. The TSV files use tabs and LF line endings where the CSV files use commas and CRLF.

What is the MIME type of a TSV file?

The MIME type is text/tab-separated-values. The file extension is .tsv.

Is a sample TSV file the same as a dummy or example TSV file?

Yes. Sample, test, dummy and example TSV files are different names for the same thing: a TSV file with known contents that stands in for a real one. Any file on this page will do wherever a tutorial or a test plan asks for a dummy TSV file.

Free TSV sample files

Tabular text with a tab between fields and a line break between rows. Simpler than CSV, because nothing is quoted. Download valid TSV test files in 6 exact sizes, from 1 KB to 10 MB, each with a checksum.

Extension: .tsv
MIME type: text/tab-separated-values
Kind: Text
Category: Spreadsheets

TSV files by size

Every file below is a valid Tab-separated values file of exactly the stated size. Open a file's page for its checksum and contents, and to preview it in your browser before downloading.

TSV sample files by size
File	Size	Contents	Download
1 KB TSV samplesample-tsv-1kb.tsv	1 KB1,024 bytes	Data rows: 7	Download TSV
10 KB TSV samplesample-tsv-10kb.tsv	10 KB10,240 bytes	Data rows: 79	Download TSV
100 KB TSV samplesample-tsv-100kb.tsv	100 KB102,400 bytes	Data rows: 787	Download TSV
1 MB TSV samplesample-tsv-1mb.tsv	1 MB1,048,576 bytes	Data rows: 7,937	Download TSV
5 MB TSV samplesample-tsv-5mb.tsv	5 MB5,242,880 bytes	Data rows: 39,187	Download TSV
10 MB TSV samplesample-tsv-10mb.tsv	10 MB10,485,760 bytes	Data rows: 78,229	Download TSV

What is a TSV file?

A TSV file stores a table as plain text: one record per line, with fields separated by a tab character. Because tabs almost never occur inside real data, the format needs no quoting rules, which removes the main source of trouble in CSV.

The media type text/tab-separated-values has been registered since 1993, and its definition is one paragraph long: a header line of field names, then records, and no tabs inside a field. Bioinformatics tools, database exports and the clipboard of every spreadsheet use the format.

How to recognise a TSV file

TSV files have no file signature, the magic bytes that most binary formats begin with.

No signature bytes. TSV files are identified by parsing their content.

Extension	.tsv
MIME type	text/tab-separated-values
Media type registration	IANA text/tab-separated-values (1993)
Delimiter	Tab (U+0009)
Quoting	None in the registered definition
Extensions	.tsv and .tab

What to test for

These are the behaviours that most often go wrong when software handles TSV files.

A field cannot contain a tab or a line break. Exporters deal with that in incompatible ways: some write backslash escapes such as \t, some apply CSV-style quotation marks, and some corrupt the row.
An importer built for CSV may treat quotation marks in a TSV file as quoting and strip them from the data.
Windows does not open .tsv in Excel by default, so users rename files to .txt or .csv, and the extension stops describing the content.

Strengths of TSV

No quoting rules: a tab ends a field and a line break ends a record.
Easy to cut, sort and join with command-line tools, and what spreadsheets put on the clipboard.

Limitations of TSV

A field cannot hold a tab or a line break without an escape convention the reader may not share.
No types, no schema and no declared encoding, the same as CSV.

Typical uses of TSV test files

Testing import features that accept more than one delimiter
Checking delimiter detection
Loading test data into a database in bulk
Testing data pipelines that split fields on tabs

Software that opens TSV

Microsoft Excel, Google Sheets and LibreOffice Calc
pandas, R and DuckDB
cut, awk and sort on the command line
PostgreSQL COPY and MySQL LOAD DATA, whose default text format is tab-delimited

Specifications

IANA registration of text/tab-separated-values

TSV sample files: questions

Do the TSV samples use quotation marks?: No. No field contains a tab, a line break or a quotation mark, so the files read the same way under every TSV convention.
Do the TSV and CSV samples hold the same data?: Yes. Both have the same twelve columns of fictional customer records. The TSV files use tabs and LF line endings where the CSV files use commas and CRLF.
What is the MIME type of a TSV file?: The MIME type is text/tab-separated-values. The file extension is .tsv.
Is a sample TSV file the same as a dummy or example TSV file?: Yes. Sample, test, dummy and example TSV files are different names for the same thing: a TSV file with known contents that stands in for a real one. Any file on this page will do wherever a tutorial or a test plan asks for a dummy TSV file.