About the HTML to TSV Converter
Tab separated output is the format a spreadsheet understands with no import wizard at all. Copy TSV to the clipboard, click a cell in Excel, Numbers or Google Sheets and paste, and the columns land where they belong. Comma separated data triggers a delimiter prompt and mangles anything containing a comma, which is why the tab version is worth the extra step.
The extractor parses the markup with the browser own HTML parser, so a table copied from the inspector with its whitespace and inline styles intact reads exactly as the page did. Merged cells are the interesting part: a colspan or rowspan leaves holes in a naive row by row read, and the grid here fills them by repeating the merged value across every position it covers. Turn that off if you prefer the value once with blanks beside it, which is what a pivot table usually wants.
Cell text is normalised on the way out. Runs of whitespace collapse to one space, non breaking spaces become ordinary ones, and leading and trailing space is trimmed, which means the values never contain a literal tab or newline and no quoting is needed anywhere in the file. Set the table number to zero to export every table on the page separated by a blank line, or drop the header row when you are appending to a sheet that already has one. Empty cells can be filled with a marker such as NULL for a database import. For the comma version and its quoting rules, use HTML Table to CSV.
How to use
- Paste the page source, or right click the table in your browser and choose Copy outerHTML.
- Set Table number to pick one table, or 0 to export every table on the page.
- Leave Expand merged cells on so colspan and rowspan values repeat across the grid.
- Press Copy, then click a cell in your spreadsheet and paste.
Common questions
- Why TSV rather than CSV for a spreadsheet?
- Pasting tab separated text into a sheet splits into columns immediately, while comma separated text opens an import dialog and misreads any value containing a comma.
- What happens to links and images in cells?
- Only the visible text is kept. A cell holding a link exports its label, and an image with no text beside it exports as an empty cell.
- The tool says my table does not exist.
- The number is one based and counts every table element in the input. Check how many the page has, or use 0 to export them all.
- Can I convert TSV back into a table?
- Yes. Paste the rows into the Table to HTML converter, which rebuilds thead and tbody from the same data.