Ronald Duncan wrote a 2009 post arguing for ASCII delimited text instead of CSV or tab-delimited files.
HN commenters return to it often as a perennial favorite on using ASCII separator characters, and some discuss the proposed USV format and why they still prefer TSV.
I really wish ASCII delimited text didn't die off.
https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-formats-ascii-delimited-text-not-csv-or-tab-delimited-text/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7474600
But, it suffered from not having designated keys on common keyboards, therefore it wasn't obviously necessary for plain text editors to support. Meanwhile, everyone uses plain text editors for everything --even if it means jumping through hoops full of exceptions and corner cases to pretend they can handle more than plain text.
Replying to myself, because after reviewing other comments I realized I didn't read the linked post thoroughly enough. Near the end he proposes a format called "usv", basically using the control codes (unit separator \u001f and record separator \u001e) built into ASCII and now Unicode for their intended purpose, which is actually a really good idea! Apparently this had been noted earlier as a format called "adt"[0].
[0]https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-formats-ascii-delimited-text-not-csv-or-tab-delimited-text/
More expressions of the same idea:
https://www.ccsv.io/
And this perennial favorite here at HN:
https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-formats-ascii-delimited-text-not-csv-or-tab-delimited-text/
I've been toying with the idea of starting a change.org campaign, asking Microsoft to add support to Excel for importing and exporting such files. I don't see any way to make any progress if Microsoft won't push the industry forward.
“Any file is a database if you awk hard enough.” —Bryan Horstmann-Allen
https://twitter.com/neilkod/status/914217352564137984
Furthermore, no thread on CSV files can be complete without mentioning this infamous bit of fact-trolling: the ASCII standard has had unit- and record-delimiters baked into it from the beginning.
https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-formats-ascii-delimited-text-not-csv-or-tab-delimited-text/
Wouldn't it be wonderful if we actually used ASCII as it was designed?
Oct Dec Hex Char
----------------------------------------
034 28 1C FS (file separator)
035 29 1D GS (group separator)
036 30 1E RS (record separator)
037 31 1F US (unit separator)
https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-formats-ascii-delimited-text-not-csv-or-tab-delimited-text/
This is why I switched to TSV. The risks are too high.
(Yes, I know about ASCII delimiters, but IMHO /t and /n are good enough for numbers-first files, especially considering how most keyboards don't feature the aforementioned delimiters, and hardly anyone has even heard of them.)
https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-formats-ascii-delimited-text-not-csv-or-tab-delimited-text/