this doesn't directly address the ease-of-editing concern, but if you have csv (or tsv) and want ascii (0x1f, 0x1e) or unicode(U+241F, U+241E) separated (or vice versa), 'miller' [0] is a command line tool that supports converting among these formats with these one-liners:

    mlr --icsv --oasv cat input.csv  # csv to asv
    mlr --iasv --ocsv cat input.asv  # asv to csv

[0] https://miller.readthedocs.io/en/latest/

[1] https://miller.readthedocs.io/en/latest/file-formats/#csvtsv...

Thank you for pointing them out. I've browsed, and searched through that ascii table countless times, usually looking for something in particular, yet never realized that there were such a thing as separators before.

It makes more sense to me in these days of ubiquitous encoding of in-band data that it would be easier to edit if we just used tabs and newlines. If you need a tab in your data, the standard could support either \t (requiring \\t if you need a literal backslash followed by a literal 't') or %09 or &09; or \x09 or something.