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How to handle tab delimited csv file? #261
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Hi Stefan Wolfrum (@metawops), can you try changing the file extension to
tsvto see if it works? Typically.csvfiles use a comma, and.tsvfiles use a tab as delimiters.We could add features to do better column detection, as well as handle semicolon and international number formats which use a comma as a decimal.
Reacted by Stefan Wolfrum, Jonas Wirth and whan291223Hi Stefan Wolfrum (@metawops), can you try changing the file extension to
tsvto see if it works? Typically.csvfiles use a comma, and.tsvfiles use a tab as delimiters.That actually worked. However, Windows Explorer now doesn’t show the Excel document icon anymore because Excel apparently isn’t connected with
.tsvfiles.
Anyway, thanks for the hint!We could add features to do better column detection, as well as handle semicolon and international number formats which use a comma as a decimal.
I’d appreciate that. Always a hassle working with decimal points/commas in number, date formats, commas in strings that are not field separators etc.pp.
Quick fix could be to make the column separator an editable setting ;-)
Need semicolon as separator, because comma is the decimal separator in german!
Reacted by ⚒️, Dan Marshall and ClauSI agree working with nested json in columns so using ~ for separator. The ~ never shows up in the data but almost any other character could. Most commonly csv files use a comm but the c can stand for character separated file. So Allowing separation by a selected character helps a lot, when data contains embedded commas.
Quick fix could be to make the column separator an editable setting ;-)
Need semicolon as separator, because comma is the decimal separator in german!
Same here, this problem is due to the switched "." and "," within numbers. I raised this as idea #606 before checking for this issue.
same here. Comma separator is for decimals in spanish, so unable to use SandDance in vscode
Grave digging but the column separator needs to be an editable setting.
- linked a pull request that will close this issueAuto-detect tab-delimited CSV files with manual delimiter override #818
on Apr 27, 2026
I have a csv file with the tab character als a delimiter.
I'm in VSCode and have the file open.
Extensions like Rainbow CSV have no problem detecting the columns.
But SandDance doesn't recognize my columns. It just sees one single column.
How can I tell SandDance (the VSCode extension) to use the tab character as a delimiter?