I think we hugged it to death.

https://archive.is/4anlI

Seems to be down

This comes up every so often. I think there are good reasons it hasn't caught on. Here's a relevant comment from ten years ago:

> whole point is to be roughly human-readable and using non-printing characters defeats that. You can't even easily enter these things via the command line.

> If we're abandoning human-readability, why even bother with ASCII? Just use a binary format. Has anyone actually used ASCII unit and record separator delimiters successfully? I'd be curious about what advantages they had over a binary format, even just a protobuf or Thrift serialized form. If we want to preserve schemalessness, there's stuff like Sereal.

--- arjie, June 8, 2016

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

Here's another one from more than twelve years ago:

> I've done this.

> Everybody hated it. Most text editors don't display anything useful with these characters (either hiding them altogether or showing a useless "uknown" placeholder), and spreadhseet tools don't support the record separator (although they all let you provide a custom entry separator so the "unit" separator can work). Besides the obvious problem that there's no easy way to type the darned things when somebody hand-edits the file.

--- Pxtl, March 26, 2014

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

The problem in practice with CCSV files, is they are no longer human editable, nor will tools like Excel automatically parsed them (maybe, I haven't checked in ~10 years, however I doubt CSV parsing has improved at all).

If the files aren't human editable anymore, why stick with CSV at all?

This is generally called ASV for ASCII-separated values, or USV for Unicode-separated values (e.g. U+241E, which is different from the ASCII U+001E equivalent).

Also, as wonderful as this would be, as other comments say, no one uses it because no one uses it.

I thought this was going to be about comma-separated CSV files.