It's a lot easier to administratively ban tabs/newlines in your data than it is to ban commas, and TSV doesn't have escape mechanisms or quoting. So you actually can parse it with line.chomp().split("\t"), and that doesn't break horrendously.

TSV is streamable and minimally wasteful, I rather approve of it. Netstrings are better though if having sized data and nested data is needed. They are proof against all the ills of quoting and escapes.

Largely agree. I was just picking up on "vastly superior". All the issues of line breaks, nulls, column lengths, headers still remain.

You're adding the constraint that you can't use tabs or newlines in your data (to use a newline in your String, you'd need to escape it). In all other cases, you need escaping, and once you've assumed escaping then CSV and TSV aren't really any different.

Also, I should have known there was a RFC for CSV. Too bad that the main call for CSV data is from cranky old versions of Excel in the hands of non technical customers.