If history had gone differently, the separators would be useful for separating things in files, but it didn't.
FS enjoys quite significant use nowadays on terminal keyboards in the worlds of Unix and Linux, it being the usual special character mapped to SIGQUIT. GS and RS are similarly fairly mainstream commands in VIM/NeoVIM.
You might want to hold back on your condescending laughter for a bit. Neither vim nor nano allow me to insert a control character by pressing Ctrl+key, so how am I supposed enter the FS character when editing a text file? Besides, there are other operating systems besides Unix and Linux (cough Windows cough).
VIM/NeoVIM cannot stop you from entering control characters by pressing [Control] and a key. It is a function of one's terminal or terminal emulator that (aside from employing some fairly unconventional keyboard maps) does not get turned off.
You are confusing entering text with typing control characters on a keyboard. One types these control characters with VIM/NeoVIM all of the time. One of them, after all, is ESC, and the others are fairly common as I said. That the control characters are commands, even in insert mode, is a different matter. One such command is the SYN control character, typed on the keyboard of course with the [Control] key as [Control]-V, whose use demonstrates that in VIM/NeoVIM one most definitely can insert control characters as text.
The fact that you brought up nano is also somewhat risible. That has a large banner across the bottom of the screen telling you what control characters the editor responds to, which one uses the [Control] key to type on the keyboard. It's staring you right in the face. (FS is even one of the ones on the main menu.)
I'll let you discover the equally simple key chord that you can use with nano, which likewise does let you insert control characters as text with the [Control] key.
As for Windows, you might want to fire up a console and actually try pressing some [Control]-key chords. For best results, run a console program that follows much the same convention. In TCC, for example, Alt-255 is the literal-next-character convention. But even without such a program, SUB as an end of input indicator, typed on the keyboard as [Control]-Z, is a fairly easy demonstration; and an application-level convention that goes back a long way.
Please edit that sort of thing out of your comments here. The GP shouldn't have included that provocation, but there are a lot of provocations on the internet, and for good discussion here we all need to build a certain immunity. A perfectly good thread about control characters needn't be marred by ill will!
Your keyboard doesn’t have the following keys?
ctl-\, ctl-], ctl-^, and ctl-_
Re: “symbolic” escapes, sure, but there’s always:
\x1c, \x1d, \x1e, and \x1f
Not everything can be a single character, there’s only 26 of those in the English language.
$ echo ^\^]^^^_|od -c
0000000 034 035 036 037 \n
0000005
I suspect fewer than 1% of computer users has these memorized. For that matter, I suspect fewer than 1% of software developers or sysadmins have these memorized.
In contrast, the comma, tab, and return keys are easily located on any keyboard, and CSV delimiters are all so common as to be readily printable by any text editor.
Meanwhile, unix escape sequences don't solve the quoting / escape problem of representing strings containing the delimiters anyway.
Remember that CSV is also for human consumption.
> Counting on some other system to do the right thing is silly.
Do you see the contradiction in these statements?
For example, in Rust you can write this:
This isn't specific to IPv6 by the way. It also applies to other standards like CSV (although I suppose with CSV it does vary, I saw so many broken CSV files that sometimes a custom implementation is the best way to go to parse those).