This is a perennial topic. Related prior discussion on this forum alone is voluminous:

> I'm surprised never to have seen any support for CSV files using US/RS instead of TAB/(CR)LF or comma/(CR)LF. Or any support in Unix to use RS instead of LF or NUL to delineate records.

February 27, 2022, on: "The Great Curly Brace Trace Chase (2003)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30493914

> If we're going to change the format, why not just use the record separator, and field separator characters.

August 19, 2021, on: "A straightforward way to extend CSV with metadata"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28236339

> Time to retire the CSV?

August 18, 2021

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28221654

> I think we should just stop using commas and newlines and start using the ASCII unit separator and record separator

June 3, 2021, on "RFC 4180: Common Format and MIME Type for CSV Files (2005)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27381832

> The record separator ship sailed long ago. The advantage of newline is that it’s easy to use with a bunch of standard tools like less/head/tail/your text editor.

May 25, 2021, on "Newline Delimited JSON"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=27282810

> What both models lacked was a good way to handle optional/sparse fields.

February 26, 2021

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=26271877

> It's very annoying that ascii includes file and record separator characters and csv still exists

December 18, 2020 on: "What If OpenDocument Used SQLite? (2014)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25466122

> ASCII 31 is a "unit separator" (or field separator as we'd call it today) and ASCII 30 is a record separator.

November 29, 2020

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=25248935

> Easy: CSVs are human readable and writeable and humans tend to have a comma sign on their keyboard, while they don't have the ASCII record seperator visible (teaching them to use eg Alt + 30 will not work).

May 15, 2020 on: "So you want to write your own CSV code (2014)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23190918

> ASCII also includes control characters for delimiting text records. If people used these purposed-designed characters instead of comma or tab characters as delimiters, we could avoid many headaches quoting and escaping CSV data.

September 26, 2019, on: "Four Column ASCII (2017)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21077054

> many of the pain points of CSV/TSV could be addressed by using US (unit separator) or RS (record separator) bytes instead.

April 11, 2018, on: "Problems with CSVs (2016)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16812211

> ASCII actually contains four control characters for this purpose: file, group, record and unit separator. I'm sure a lot of problems would be solved if people just used these.

April 11, 2018, on: "Problems with CSVs (2016)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16810744

> Ask HN: Why isn't ASCII codes 28 – 31 used more often to serialize tabular data?

December 15, 2017

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15934407

> ASCII defines a unit separator, and a record separator. I wish we would just bite the bullet and start using this 50 year old solution.

December 27, 2016

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13267340

> It really makes me sad that CSV even exists: ASCII defines field ('unit') & record separator characters (also group & file, but those are less-useful), as well as an escape character.

June 8, 2016 on: "ParaText: CSV parsing at 2.5 GB per second"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11862769

> ASCII has field record separator for instance. Free CSV.

July 2, 2015 on: "Stop the Vertical Tab Madness (2010)"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9817935

> Good old ASCII has characters specifically devoted to separating fields, keys, etc. that no-one uses for anything else. Why not use them instead of inventing a new character that does the same thing?

June 5, 2015 on: "Almost every Cassandra feature has some surprising behavior"

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9666275

> ASCII Delimited Text – Not CSV or TAB delimited text

March 26, 2014

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7474600