I wanted the format to degrade to CSV which is why I chose the ordering I did. As for the escaping that's because I wanted to be able to escape a comma without

I wanted the format to degrade to CSV which is why I chose the ordering I did. As for the escaping that's because I wanted to be able to escape a comma without using a comma. I want to be able to use sed or awk without having to worry a field having a comma. The pascal and null terminated values are for binary datatypes, which wouldn't be editable in a text editor (by muggles anyway). That said I'm not sure why I thought storing a string in a binary field was a sane idea. I've been debating using the header to store field metadata. I do agree that it'll be cleaner. Also, it would alleviate most of the issues with the odd seperator precedence. I also agree that it should default to utf8 friendly strings by default. I'll change that in the spec. Thanks for your feedback; I greatly appreciate it.