mTSV

mTSV is a simple, plain-text file format. it is very similar to the TSV file format — with the only difference being the addition of “invisible lines”. both file formats represent a table of data.

to make this specification simple: each field in the table is separated by a TAB character ('\t' or 0x09). each record in the table is separated by a LINE FEED character ('\n' or 0x0A). if a line if the file begins with an OCTOTHORP character ('#' or 0x23) then it can be ignored (i.e. treated as a comment).

an example file is shown below (note the TAB may appear as spaces, depending on your browser settings).

# this is an example mTSV file.
# each of these lines CAN be ignored by a parsing library.
record 1, field 1	record 1, field 2	record 1, field 3	record 1, field 4
# “invisible lines” can on any line in the file.
record 2, field 1	record 2, field 2	record 2, field 3	record 2, field 4