If your goal is, very specifically, to be sure that every line in your file has 
17 tabs in it, there is a simple solution.

>From the BBEdit Text menu, choose “Process lines containing…”.

Choose the “Find lines that … do not contain: option.
In the search field, enter

        ([^\t]*\t){17}

Check the Grep option, choose your preferred result options, and click Process. 
You will get a list (or report, or whatever) of all the lines in your file that 
don’t contain 17 tabs.

Cheers,
Neil Faiman

> On Mar 17, 2023, at 6:35 PM, Laurel Cooper <[email protected]> wrote:
> 
> I work with large, tsv-formatted text files The files are 17 column text 
> files with the columns separated by tabs.  I need to be able to see that none 
> of the tabs are missing. 
> I can see the tab stops by turning on "Show invisibles", but in some lines 
> the tabs are basically on top of each other, and in other places, the text is 
> on top of them.  
> Is there a better way to display these files? 
> I took a screen shot as an example:
> Thanks!
> 
> <tsv.jpg>
> 
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> <tsv.jpg>

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