There’s no question that Markdown is the darling of the coding/internet/people who write communities. It’s the default syntax at GitHub, Stack Overflow, Reddit and others. A lot of popular text editors are built around it.

Markdown’s appeal is its simplicity. It is easy to learn, and easy to read even in native form. It’s easy to extend: the pages on this site, for example, are written in a Markdown variant – something I’ll write more about later.

Okay, we all love Markdown - great, but what does this have to do with spreadsheets? Well, there’s a Markdown for spreadsheets, and it’s been hiding in plain sight practically as long as we’ve had computers. – tab separated variables. Think about it – TSV format is so simple that you can view it on any device. You can import it into practically any spreadsheet software. And it’s one hell of a lot easier to parse programatically than CSV format.

Parsing a CSV file is a pain in the ass. There are at least four different implementations, mostly centering around the concept of whether variables should be quoted or not, and under what circumstances, and what to do with internal quotes. The only question with TSV is… what to do if you want to put a tab in your data. Most software I’ve seen just substitutes a space, or a few spaces. But only one exception to catch means that when you’re parsing a TSV file programatically you don’t have to look for a lot.

There aren’t a lot of great utilities out there for working with TSV files, so I’m going to post a couple that I use all the time.

TSVFMT

A Spreadsheet for Your Command Line

I wrote this BASH script, which I’ve named tsvfmt, to address the problem of alignment when viewing TSV files in the command line or a text editor. It takes a TSV and uses awk to space it out and place a “|” character between columns. So this:

this	is	a	test

… would become this:

this | is | a | test | 

Here’s the script:

TSV2HTML

Convert a TSV File to an HTML Snippet

This one is a little more self-explanatory. Pass it a TSV file, either from STDIN or piped over, and it’ll convert it to an HTML table. Best used in conjunction with bcat, which is awesome.

UPDATE (2012.05.02 10:58:18) - both of the above files are now available as part of the dlm-dot-bin project that I’ve shared on GitHub.