[jrochkind1]

I find no matter what you do you will _sometimes_ need escaping. There will, eventually, come a time when you want to embed an ASCII 30 (0x usually means hex, it's actually decimal code 30, but hex 0x1E) RS Record Separator in some record delimited by 30 RS. So you'll need some method of escaping anyway. Or it'll be annoying.

I have spent some time working with MARC 21 binary encoding (used for library cataloging records) which uses ASCII 0x1D, 0x1E, and 0X1F as delimiters. I would def not call it appreciably more _convenient_ than a more modern 'text' record format. If it has benefits, convenience isn't really one of them.

[nitrogen]

I think it's common to use ESC (0x1b) and then set the high bit on the next byte, so ESC itself would be sent as 0x1b, 0x8b.