[fatneckbeardz]

but which delimiter.

if you choose pipe ok, now you have to make sure nobody typed a pipe into the input field or spreadsheet, and you cannot store unix commands

if you choose tab, ok, now people will get confused when they try to edit the text file to replace tabs with spaces, and now you have trouble putting code snippets into data fields because they have tabs.

this is the problem and it's why xml/json exist.

in my particular domain, tab separated works pretty well but in a general context of the world at large, i feel like JSON has reasons it exists.

[elcritch]

Well the obvious solution would be ASCII 0x1D (Group Separator)! Accept, no one actually uses those ASCII characters. Kind of bums me out that UNIX basically skipped out on them.

[hermitcrab]

I agree. Lots of discussion related to proposing that here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31220841

[kevinmgranger]

It's not a separator character, but at least vim and emacs acknowledge the page feed character. A pittance, I suppose.

[civopsec]

Both pipe and tab are infinitely better for so-called human-readable data compared to comma. Comma doesn’t even work well for numbers since some locales use comma as the decimal separator. And a data format can’t be “human-readable” if you’re not allowed to write numbers in the way that you’re used to write them.

[ndsipa_pomu]

Pipes are quite common, but for tricky data, I'd recommend ¬. It's on most keyboards and I can't think of any other use of it.

[tom_]

This symbol is not present on US keyboards.

[toast0]

> but which delimiter

Control characters. Like ctrl-A and stuff. Almost nobody has them in their data.