I rarely want text as output format, I want structured data that I can explore in a structured fashion. As oblio said, you can come up with a standard conversi

I rarely want text as output format, I want structured data that I can explore in a structured fashion. As oblio said, you can come up with a standard conversion of structured data to text. The other way round you need write a parser for every textual output format, and typically people come up with fragile ad-hoc parsers that don't deal with edge cases properly.