The number of times I've had to deal with parsing errors because of embedded carriage returns, commas, tabs, etc., sometimes costing millions of dollars is just... upsetting.
It's like JSON... we say everything can parse it, but really what we've got is some approximation that will come back to haunt us... and once you've done all the work to make sure everything is precise and correct, you'd really have saved time if you'd just used the tools we already had in the first place.
To make matters worse, both formats are full of pitfalls:
http://seriot.ch/parsing_json.php https://arp242.net/yaml-config.html
using either of these, in my opinion, is extremely misguided.
You should have a go at writing a JSON parser to convince yourself it isn't hard. Can manually lex it in less than 150 lines of Python.
They'll all agree how clever and useful the meta characters are of course, but only after you've given them your time in learning about it. No thanks no thanks no thanks. For me I'd rather deal with a little bit of serialization headache then a support headache.
1. TSV can be read and imported by almost everything.
2. People can add and adjust TSV files from any editor.
3. What’s the way to insert meta characters again In VIM? And now nano? Argh I’ll just try and copy and paste it. Ugh that doesn’t work.
Just use CSV/TSV folks. Anything more complicated and reach for a better serialization format (json, yaml) and not a better delimiter.