Tab-separated values

The following are records of the Iris flower data set in TSV format. Since a tab is not a printable character (is invisible), an arrow (→) is used for demonstration here to denote a tab character. The following is the same data rendered as a table. If a text editor that supports Dynamic tab stops (aka. "elastic tabstops") is used to view the contents of a TSV file, the layout will look like the table rendering just without cell borders and header row formatting (though the latter can be achieved using Unicode characters). ==Delimiter collision==

As a form of delimiter collision, if a field (record value) contained a tab character, the data format would become meaningless since tabs were no longer only used between fields. To prevent this situation, the IANA media type standard for TSV simply disallows a tab within a field. Similarly, a value cannot contain a line terminator. To represent a value with an embedded tab or line terminator character, a commonly-used mechanism is to replace the character with the corresponding escape sequence as shown in the following table. ==Line terminator==

As for any text file, the character(s) used for line terminator varies. On a Microsoft-based system, normally it's a carriage return (CR) and line feed (LF) sequence. On a Unix-based system, it's just LF. The de-facto specification uses the term "EOL" which is an ambiguous term like line terminator and newline. Software often is designed to either handle the line terminator for the platform on which it runs or to handle either terminator. == References ==