[joeld42]

I like the idea but this is non-standard enough to be just as hard as making a custom format.

In my experience, the best way to handle this is:

1) Use TSV (tab-separated) instead of CSV (most things that export CSV also export TSV). Strip LF characters while reading and assume newlines are CR.

2) If you have a stubborn data source that insists on CSV, convert it to TSV in a pre-process. This could be a separate step or part of your reader as you're reading in the file. That means there's a single place to handle the escaping nonsense, and you can tailor that to each data source.