Re:ASCII and Unicode quotation marks
by emmelaich on Wednesday September 13, 2017 @06:57PM
(#15243516)
If it's for my own programs, I use pipe (|) separated values.
They're visually appropriate and even less likely than tabs.
[ Parent
| on HN ]
ASCII does contain control characters set aside for record and unit separators (codes 30 and 31 respectively). Sometimes I wish they got more use than they do.
Except pipe is really easy to get as a typo. It's right next to the enter key. And then you're dealing with escaping characters and before you know if you've rolled your own file format.
Been there. Use a lib that implements a documented standard, even a bad one. Only problem is Excel, which basically standardizes on CSV and occasionally mangles your data into malformed dates because reasons anyways.