I found tab-separated files can get me pretty far. It can handle arbitrary length text, Unicode is no problem at all, leading/trailing spaces are preserved and

I found tab-separated files can get me pretty far. It can handle arbitrary length text, Unicode is no problem at all, leading/trailing spaces are preserved and so on. It is trivially convertible to name=value format, as long as you guarantee the "name" part is well-formed (usually the case). The only tricky parts are embedded line feeds and tabs, and those can be defeated with trivial escape schema, even something as simple as '\r', '\t', '\\'. Bash quoting also works. If you master the difference between "${x[@]}" and ${x[*]}, keep in mind order of expand / split all the time, and never forget the right kind of quotes, you can have a robust system which can handle arbitrary strings. But I would not recommend this to anyone.