I've done ETL work with systems that used the ASCII separators. It was very pleasant work. Not having to worry about escaping things (because the ASCII separato

I've done ETL work with systems that used the ASCII separators. It was very pleasant work. Not having to worry about escaping things (because the ASCII separators weren't permitted to be in valid source data to begin with) was very, very nice. I'm a Notepad++ person. When I needed to mock-up data typing the characters was easy-- just ALT and the ASCII code on the numeric pad. It took a bit to memorize the codes I needed to use. Their visual representation is just inverse text and initials.