[Cyberdog]

While that's true, the way text editors handle these characters is not standardized, and many may not let you input them. One of the important features of CSV/TSV is that they're relatively easy to edit by hand, and for that you need separator characters that are easy for both text editors and humans to work with.

Personally, since I've discovered the field/group/record/file separator characters in ASCII, I've been using them to concat fields and rows on one-to-many SQL joins. They work great for that purpose since (at least on all the projects I've done this with so far) I can be certain that none of the values in the joined data will have those characters, so no further escaping is necessary. For example, in MySQL:

  SELECT
    i.item_id,
    GROUP_CONCAT(CONCAT_WS(0x1F, f.field_id, f.field_value) SEPARATOR 0x1E) AS field_values
  FROM items i 
  LEFT JOIN fields f ON f.item_id = i.item_id
  WHERE ...

Then split field_values with 0x1E to get each field ID and field value pair, and split each of those on 0x1F. Easy as pie.