[mmasashi]

It does not solve the problem. Here is the points which I think.

1. Control characters are not supported in the almost of text editors. 2. Control characters are not human friendly. 3. The text may contain control characters in the field value.

In any formats, we cannot avoid the escape characters, so even I think CSV/TSV format is reasonable.

[stronglikedan]

You are correct in that it does not solve a problem. Furthermore, the article tries to create a problem with CSV that does not exist.

> CSV breaks depending on the implementation on Quotes, Commas and lines

CSV does not break; the implementation is broken if it doesn't parse CSV properly. With a proper implementation, CSV solves every problem that will arise from this method.

[__david__]

The problem with CSV is that it looks so simple that nobody ever uses a real library to do it—they just roll their own. So you end up with a million implementations that are all buggy in various different ways. If you receive a CSV formatted file you can never be sure if it's actually good, valid CSV, or some invalid crap from that some programmer that reinvented the wheel because it was "so easy".

[saalweachter]

And as a side effect, if you are relying on lots of data files provided by other people, you inevitably end up with a library 57,000 parsers, 55,000 of which are for different, slightly broken CSV files.