# Delimited file where delimiter clashes with data values

A comma-separated values (CSV) file is a typical way to store tabular/rectangular data. If a data cell contain a comma, then the cell with the commas is typically wrapped with quotes. However, what if a data cell contains a comma and a quotation mark? To avoid such scenarios, it is typically wise to use a delimiter that has a low chance of showing up in your data, such as the pipe (“|”) or caret (“^”) character. However, there are cases when the data is a long string with all sorts of data characters, including the pipe and caret characters. What then should the delimiter be in order to avoid a delimiter collision? As the Wikipedia article suggests, using special ASCII characters such as the unit/field separator (hex: 1F) could help as they probably won’t be in your data (no keyboard key that corresponds to it!).

Currently, my rule of thumb is to use pipe as the default delimiter. If the data contains complicated strings, then I’ll default to the field separator character. In Python, one could refer to the field separator as ‘\ x1f’. In R, one could refer to it as ‘\ x1F’. In SAS, it could be specified as ‘1F’x. In bash, the character could be specified on the command line (e.g., using the cut command, csvlook command, etc) by specifying \$’1f’ as the delimiter character.

If the file contains the newline character in a data cell (\n), then the record separator character (hex: 1E) could be used for determining new lines.

Statistician