Nice plug for gitlab ;).

\0 is an insanely useful separator for this sort of thing and yeah, it definitely gets messy. I'm working on a similar project that uses clojure/chef to read proc files in a way that causes as little overhead as possible. \0 makes life so much easier used. The best example I can think of off of the top of my head is something similar to:

  bash -c "export FOO=1 ; export BAR=2 && cat /proc/self/environ | tr '\0' '\n' | egrep 'FOO|BAR'"
  FOO=1
  BAR=2