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Preach; the POSIX standard also understands this, and partitions control characters into portable and non-portable ones; the ASCII field/record/group delimiters

Preach; the POSIX standard also understands this, and partitions control characters into portable and non-portable ones; the ASCII field/record/group delimiters are designated as non-portable, and therefore can be safely used to delimit portable character data. The fact that the whole file is then non-portable is a feature, not a bug; if you need to pack an entire table into a field, encode it in some portable encoding (eg base64) and add a decoder field. The "arguments" against this are absurd; mainly that the resulting file is not plain text and cannot be read/modified immediately by plain text editors. This ignores the fact that plain text editors already deal with control characters because they have to decide what to do with <tab>, and makes a mountain out of a molehill when the in-band horrors of escaping delimiters create trouble every single day.

chrishill89 3y ago
> The fact that the whole file is then non-portable is a feature, not a bug; if you need to pack an entire table into a field, encode it in some portable encoding (eg base64) and add a decoder field. I guess you could: 1. Use unit-separator and record-separator for text 2. Use group-separator for (1) 3. Use file-separator for (2) > The "arguments" against this are absurd; mainly that the resulting file is not plain text and cannot be read/modified immediately by plain text editors. This ignores the fact that plain text editors already deal with control characters because they have to decide what to do with <tab>, and makes a mountain out of a molehill when the in-band horrors of escaping delimiters create trouble every single day. Could not agree more.