Compress TSV Files Online

Compress TSV files without changing your data

Tab-separated files are the everyday format for database exports, spreadsheet copy-and-paste, Google Sheets downloads, and scientific data like gene expression tables. They're easy to read and easy to bloat: stray spaces around values, blank rows, empty columns, and duplicate lines add up, and a large export can run to hundreds of megabytes. This tool cleans those up without touching a single value you didn't ask it to change, then compresses the result into a ZIP or gzip file that's typically 80 to 90 percent smaller.

Everything runs in your browser. Your data never leaves your computer.

How to use it

1. Choose a .tsv, .tab, or tab-delimited .txt file, drop it on the box, or paste rows copied from a spreadsheet.
2. Check the cleanup options. The defaults are safe for nearly every file.
3. Review the results: sizes, what changed, and a preview of the cleaned rows.
4. Download a cleaned TSV, a ZIP for sharing, or a gzip file for data tools. You can also save it as CSV.

Quote marks in TSV files

TSV comes in two flavors, and mixing them up is the most common way TSV tools damage data:

• Plain TSV, the official format, treats quote marks as ordinary text. A value like He said "hi" means exactly that, quotes included. Values simply can't contain tabs or line breaks.
• Excel-style TSV borrows CSV's rules. Values that contain tabs, line breaks, or quote marks are wrapped in quotes, and inner quotes are doubled, like "She said ""hi""".

The tool looks for evidence of each style, such as doubled quotes or quoted values containing tabs, and shows which one it detected. If it guesses wrong on a small or unusual file, pick the style yourself. Either way, after cleaning it reads its own output back and checks every value against what it meant to write.

What the cleanup options do

A note on shortening numbers: it saves a little space, but it changes how values look. Version numbers like 1.10 become 1.1, and prices lose their cents formatting. Values with leading zeros (007.50), thousands separators, and scientific notation are always left alone. Only turn it on for purely numeric measurement data.

ZIP or gzip?

Choose ZIP to email or share a file, since every computer can open it. Choose gzip for data work: pandas (pd.read_csv("data.tsv.gz", sep="\t")), R's read.delim, BigQuery, PostgreSQL, and command-line tools like zcat read .tsv.gz directly. Gzip is the standard for large scientific datasets for exactly this reason.

Frequently asked questions