> Oh, I see: you probably didn't know that CSV formats is also means character separated values, and can actually use non-printing ASCII characters as delimiter

> Oh, I see: you probably didn't know that CSV formats is also means character separated values, and can actually use non-printing ASCII characters as delimiters. That seems unnecessarily condescending. JSON can also mean Janky Serialized Object Notation, but that's not the common case. > I guess your experience with character separated value files is very limited. In practice, using something other than a comma is a good solution for some problems, but not others (eg transfer corruption or you know, the OP's use case). > a heavyweight solution like JSON. I've literally never heard that phrase, nor does it make much sense. At best it's 2 more characters for wrapping braces with existing quoted data/numbers and at worst you have to make up a new non-interchangeable format as you run into exceptions from the diff, which can affect past encodings. Sounds more involved than using JSON. shrug