TSV to XML Converter

This converter takes tab-separated rows and emits a flat XML document, which is most useful when you are handing tabular data to a system that still expects XML rather than CSV or JSON. Common cases are pushing a TSV export into an older interchange pipeline, an enterprise import routine, or a legacy integration endpoint that only accepts XML payloads.

It also works well for development and testing. If you keep test data as a tab-separated sheet, you can generate XML fixtures from it without writing a one-off script, then drop those fixtures into a parser, a mapping job, or a unit test. TSV is a natural source here because tab delimiters rarely collide with values that contain commas.

For data-prep and admin work, it is a quick way to reshape something pasted out of a spreadsheet or database query into structured markup for a colleague or a downstream tool. It is not a database export format or a schema-driven serializer, so reach for it when you need plain, predictable XML rather than a validated document tied to a specific XSD.

The flow is paste or drop your TSV, run the conversion, then copy the result or download it as an .xml file. Everything happens in your browser: the data is processed locally, nothing is uploaded, and nothing is retained once you close the tab.

The first row is treated as the header. Each subsequent row becomes a repeated <row> element wrapped in a single container, and every column becomes a child element named after its header. Header names are sanitised into valid tags: characters outside letters, digits, underscore, hyphen and dot are replaced with underscores, leading characters that cannot begin a tag are stripped, and an empty header falls back to a name like column_1. Values are escaped for &, <, > and quotes, and the output opens with an <?xml version="1.0" encoding="UTF-8"?> declaration so the document is well-formed.

What it does not do: it does not infer data types, add attributes, build nested or hierarchical structures, or apply a namespace or schema. Every value is emitted as element text, so numbers and dates arrive as strings exactly as they appear in the TSV.

The most frequent surprise is element naming. A header like "Unit Price ($)" becomes a tag full of underscores, and a header that starts with a digit or is blank can produce a name a strict parser may still dislike even after sanitising. Clean, simple ASCII headers before converting and your tags stay readable.

Delimiter assumptions cause the other common problem. The parser splits on tabs, so data that was actually comma-separated, or a file where tabs were converted to spaces during copy-paste, will collapse into a single column. Confirm your source is genuinely tab-delimited, and remember that the first line is always consumed as the header, even if your data has no header row.

Because there is no type handling, a leading-zero code such as 00731 stays a string, which is usually what you want but worth noting. Ragged rows with missing trailing cells produce empty or missing elements for those columns, and duplicate headers create repeated sibling elements with the same tag, which a downstream consumer may not expect.

Open the output and confirm the structure first: a single root container, one <row> per data line, and child tags that match your columns in order. Spot-check a row with special characters to verify that &, <, > and quotes were escaped, and scan a row with empty cells to see how missing values were rendered. Counting the <row> elements against your source line count, minus the header, is a fast sanity check.

Pay particular attention to the tag names produced from your header row, since that is where most issues originate. If any tag looks malformed or a value landed in the wrong column, the cause is almost always the header line or a delimiter mismatch in the source.

For official, financial, or legal use, treat the result as a draft and verify it manually. Validate the file in the target system or against its expected schema, and confirm that sanitised tag names and any numeric or date strings are accepted before you submit or archive the document.