Several people brought up alternative solutions like this, and I addressed them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15295556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item

Several people brought up alternative solutions like this, and I addressed them: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15295556 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15295556 Summary: I may have oversimplified the problem in my example. I think my solution is nicer for the real problem. It has fewer assumptions and will "scale up" to more fields with arbitrary text. I want to write the escaping ONCE, not modify it every time I change the format of the output table.