Side note: CSV is boring and unsexy as formats go; but it's also dead easy for companies to provide and even automate even with minimal technical staff on hand;

Side note: CSV is boring and unsexy as formats go; but it's also dead easy for companies to provide and even automate even with minimal technical staff on hand; this is one of the reasons I'm working with it at the moment ("CSV uploaded via SFTP" is on the list of inaterfaces we support for data integrations). Think of the character escapes involved in something like XML or even JSON, for example; for CSV you escape only the double-quote, and you escape that by adding a second double quote -- so you don't need to mess with escaping your escape character. The main problem with CSV is more that there are several possible specs for it...