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Comment by shabbyrobe | Hacker News Reader

I've always been curious about the characters in ASCII for this, but I've never seen them used in the wild. Stuff like "Group Separator" (0x1D), "Record Separator" (0x1E) or "Unit Separator" (0x1F)

Is there a reason why nobody uses these? Did someone work out back in the 90s they were pure evil and we've just never used them since?

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https://www.lammertbies.nl/comm/info/ascii-characters.html

Those codes were originally for just such a purpose, but as others point out there was a bootstrapping problem. At this point, if Excel doesn’t support it, it’s not going to gain traction.

About 10 years ago I had to use those for a financial system integration. I was getting files that had been created on a mainframe, and whoever wrote it originally had the foresight to use those characters. Probably because they were based out of EMEA and understood that commas weren’t useful across national borders.

The codes between x01 and x1F were designed for telecommunications, for instance binary custom formats over RS-232 or synchronous protocols.

There is an excellent description in "C Programmer's Guide to Serial Communications" by Joe Campbell.

There’s no physical key for them. You can trivially write/edit CSV or TSV on any computer using any editor.

Indeed. I used to clean up data in UltraEdit. With the option for direct disk read/write set, there was virtually no file-size limit.

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