[tangus]

And how do we escape those characters? With ESC (27)? Inside a SI/SO (15/14) pair?

I think CSV or TSV are good enough. People keep trying to find a format where you can separate the records and fields with a simple string.split and there's no need to contemplate escapes.

But that's not possible, no matter the format you'll have to parse it right. And then, a format that uses visual delimiters has the obvious advantage of being editable with any text editor.