text/tab-separated-values

CSV without the quoting wars: fields separated by tabs, records by newlines, and — per the 1993 IANA registration from the University of Minnesota's Gopher team — no mechanism for embedding a tab in a field at all. That refusal to escape anything is the format's entire argument: a TSV line splits correctly with one call in any language, while CSV needs a state machine for its quoted commas and doubled quotes. The trade is honest — data containing tabs simply cannot be represented — which is why bioinformatics and data pipelines that control their own values love it, and everything touching human-entered text uses CSV anyway.

.tsv is standard; .tab appears in bioinformatics tooling for the same bytes.

Defined by IANA registration — text/tab-separated-values · IANA registration. Registry facts from the IANA media-types registry via mime-db.