I've done exactly what the author suggests for the exact same reasons. CSV headaches got me searching for other delimiters and I saw there were already unit and

I've done exactly what the author suggests for the exact same reasons. CSV headaches got me searching for other delimiters and I saw there were already unit and record separators, "WTF!?". As long as you're dealing with text, and you're writing and parsing the data yourself, and you never need to use tools other than things that can be modified to set the item and line delimiters, then it's great. I haven't used the approach since then. Mostly I haven't used it because half my use cases need binary numerical data (floats) and the others can be worked with entirely in Excel or as CSVs. But I like the idea, even if the support just isn't there.