TSV to JSON

Selecting a range of cells in Excel or Google Sheets and copying it puts tab-separated data on the clipboard by default, not comma-separated — this is a deliberate and useful design choice, because it means a comma appearing inside an actual cell value is never confused with a column separator in the first place. There is no quoting or escaping needed for the vast majority of ordinary text, since the delimiter character (a tab) essentially never appears naturally inside typed spreadsheet content the way a comma routinely does.

This is exactly why pasting directly from a spreadsheet, without an explicit "export as CSV" step, produces TSV rather than CSV — recognising and correctly parsing that tab delimiter is what lets this variant accept a clipboard paste from Sheets or Excel with no intermediate export required.

Removing the comma-ambiguity problem does not remove every edge case: a copied cell can still contain an internal line break — a multi-line note or address typed into one cell — and a spreadsheet application will still wrap that field in quotes when copying it, exactly as it would for CSV. A parser that only handles the tab-splitting half of TSV correctly, without also respecting quoting for embedded newlines, still corrupts those specific rows even though it never has to worry about commas.