Swift: Why is Apple's Numbers .TSV export unable to have its values parsed by the tab character?

Question

I'm working on a basic localization pipeline where a spreadsheet exports values as TSV (tab-separated values).

Numbers exports "TSV" but the output does not show a \t character. If I open this .tsv in a text editor, the tab character is there. It also doesn't let me specify my delimiter.

Now, in swift, if I read this file, line by line, I would expect to get all my column values with this:

let columns = line.components(separatedBy: "\t")

But it does not return multiple values.

Does anyone know how to separate by tabs ?

Answer 1

It often happens this way. The answer presents itself shortly after the question.

The key is to use the unicode value and not \t, as Numbers exports the tabs as unicode values, not as '\t'.

i.e. line.components(separatedBy: "\u{0009}")

And you should note that if you're editing files in Xcode to create a test case, you should set "indent with" to Tabs and not Spaces.