I never understood why the ASCII separator characters aren't used more. It seems like we're one simple text editor feature away from having easy display and modification. Is there some historical reason for not doing that?
ASCII separators (mnemonics FS, GS, RS, US) are difficult for most users to type, and have no obvious/standardized visual representation.
Notepad++ show RS and US as little black boxes with 'RS' and 'US' in. It works well enough.
My editor, and lots of editors now, put spaces instead of tabs when I press the tab key. No reason something similar couldn't happen in CSV modes/apps.
Who is typing out CSVs anyway. You’d either use a spreadsheet tool or do it in code.
From my point of view, CSV is mostly operated in text editors because they are much faster and don't risk to do any unintended modifications.
Early on they were used in some serial and modem protocols, which was problematic when you used them in actual file content. I remember trying to use them in a file, and then when I tried to transfer them, the transfer would stop at RS.
I’ve wondered this too. At one point I started writing a hobby programming language and explicitly added escape codes for these extra control characters to be used in string literals. (Ada has them all included in the “ASCII” package which is nice.) It seems like a no-brainer to bake them into file formats like the OP describes.
Because they don't have standardized escaping, and when you are rolling your own ad-hoc escaping scheme you can just use printable separator anyway.
Really? Then I wonder what the ASCII character coded 0x10 is for?