Well, that's true. But if performance is more important to you, just skip it and go for binary formats that can be orders of magnitude more efficient. In gener

Well, that's true. But if performance is more important to you, just skip it and go for binary formats that can be orders of magnitude more efficient. In general text formats are a compromise. They are bulky and and inefficient to parse. What you get in exchange is ease of development. If you are willing to complicate the format just to improve performance, at some point you no longer get ease of development and you should just switch to binary altogether.