This seems a little better than it is. Those control characters are appealing because they're rarely used. Making them important by using them in a common data

This seems a little better than it is. Those control characters are appealing because they're rarely used. Making them important by using them in a common data exchange format will dramatically increase the rate at which you find them in the data you're trying to store. Ultimately, this is a language problem. If we invent new meta-language to describe data, we're going to use it when creating content. That means the meta-language will be used in regular language. Which means you're going to have to transform it when moving it into or out of that delimited file. There is no fixed-length encoding you can use to handle meta-information without imposing restrictions on the content. You're always going to end up with escape sequences.