Is there a way to retain the commas?

I made a new release of Columns++ with an option to do that — an additional checkbox in the Conversion settings dialog: Keep separator character when converting to tabbed.

The new release is Columns++ version 1.3.2.

I have not marked the release stable, but I believe that there is very little chance this change will have any unanticipated negative effects. It should be safe to install.

I should add that my current workaround is to highlight the affected region and do an ‘extended’ find replace, replacing “\t” with “,\t”. This works fine. Was just hoping I could avoid this need…

If you never have commas within quoted strings in your arrays, just use a slightly modified version of your work-around: without doing any conversion first, replace , with ,\t.

If you do sometimes have commas in quoted strings, you can either do what you’re doing now or devise a regular expression replacement that will skip commas within quoted strings.