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by mastax 452 days ago
ASCII has characters more or less designed for this

0x1C - File Separator

0x1D - Group Separator

0x1E - Record Separator

0x1F - Unit Separator

So I guess 1F would be the "comma" and 1E would be the "newline."

1 comments

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/8695118/what-are-the-fil...

I am pretty sure you shifted the meaning, the decimal separator is part of the atomic data it does not need a control character.

You would use 1F instead of the comma/semicolon/tab and 1E to split lines (record means line just like in SQL).

You could then use 1D to store multiple CSV tables in a single file.

Yes but then the text is not human readable or editable in a plain text editor.

This would confuse most users of csvs they are not programmers they at most use text editors and Excel.

I am not proposing to do this, but if you were to use ascii separators you would do it this way