Replying to myself, because after reviewing other comments I realized I didn't read the linked post thoroughly enough. Near the end he proposes a format called

Replying to myself, because after reviewing other comments I realized I didn't read the linked post thoroughly enough. Near the end he proposes a format called "usv", basically using the control codes (unit separator \u001f and record separator \u001e) built into ASCII and now Unicode for their intended purpose, which is actually a really good idea! Apparently this had been noted earlier as a format called "adt"[0]. [0]https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-formats-ascii-delimited-text-not-csv-or-tab-delimited-text/ https://ronaldduncan.wordpress.com/2009/10/31/text-file-form...