The best way to store arrays as text file?

[Bernard Devlin]

David said:
 >>
In general no delimiter is completely safe - safest would be XML is  
my guess
- all though I was wandering about JSON as it is simpler.
<<

I'm with Richard on this. The ASCII character set provides the  
following delimiters:

(communication controls)
SOH = start of heading
STX = start of text
ETX = end of text

and

(informational separators)
FS = file separator
GS = group separator
RS = record separator
US = unit separator

See the RFC for ASCII (from 1969):
http://rfc.net/rfc20.html

In fact, one could argue that these character codes are safer than  
the ">" and "<" of XML, as the former carry no textual meaning at all.

When I had to provide structured data before, I used combinations of  
these rather than use XML (I was dynamically updating keyword lists  
in a web page, so I wanted to keep the transmitted data as small as  
possible).

Bernard