My ex-supervisor and I recently had a conversation about what the best way to delimit data is in relation to OTHER languages, not just perl.

I argued any character would be as "optimal" as any other character (although I prefer \t). Heck, "a" could be used as the delimiter as long as you backslash-escape it. He argued that tab should ALWAYS be used simply because it's "the standard" and it's not used as much in data as "a".

Does everyone agree on what the "optimal" (or easier if you'd rather) delimeted file format is? Is there one format that's better for perl than other languages? Is there one delimeted format that's easier for every language to play with?

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perl: code of the samurai