The company I work at uses the pipe character('|') everywhere. It's fairly painless, and you can edit the files using standard text editors. It's also pretty ea

The company I work at uses the pipe character('|') everywhere. It's fairly painless, and you can edit the files using standard text editors. It's also pretty easy for clients to provide or consume pipes. CSVs are terrible - people always have trouble providing or ingesting them with the correct quoting: probably 50% of the time it's suggested there is strong resistance to the idea of using CSV quoting. TSVs are okay - you can copy-paste from Excel into your terminal so it's got that going for it. There's been one time where a client provided a couple hundred gigabytes of data where all the reasonable characters one might use were used in the fields themselves, including their own separator character(the comma). So I made up some rules for guessing which commas were delimiters and which were part of a field value, and stored it using the ASCII control character as a delimiter. The only other use of this character at my company are in jokes, like "We should ask the client to provide or ingest files separated using the ASCII control codes" which always gets a laugh.