Commas can be typed by anyone on any keyboard and readable by anyone.
Special Unicode Characters(tm) can't be typed by anyone on any keyboard and readable by noone.
Convenience is a virtue.
USV supports displayable delimiters (see https://github.com/SixArm/usv), so for the much more common case of editing an existing CSV in a text editor, you can just copy and paste.
There is value is the ability to do this level of editing and troubleshooting.
Again, I'm not saying CSVs aren't edited by hand in a text editor, I'm saying they aren't created from scratch in a text editor, even by beginners. USVs are easy to edit in a text editor, too, and I tried viewing and editing USVs with a couple different fonts and had no problems.
As for escaping, that's for the subsequent programmers (which could also be me) to figure out. If it is me, I'll deal with it because it keeps things simple.
Yeah, usually when the quoting was f'up.
While I'm not a fan of USV, I do believe it is type-able on both macOS and Linux¹. The IME's character picker in both OSes contains all of the necessary characters, I think. (I use "" in commit messages, occasionally. That was a typed , not copy/pasted from a Google query or such.)
It would be quite tedious, I do admit; reasonably typed by someone, probably not.
I don't normally type out CSVs by hand either, though.
(¹I don't know about Windows as I simply haven't cared about it in years. For all I know, they've grown an IME in the intervening decade.)
> it is nice to be able to easily type it.
Again, that's where an IME is helpful; on the OSes I mention, it's "␞" is:
macOS: ⌘+^+Space, "record", <arrows to select>, Enter
Linux: Super+e, "record", Space, Space, <arrows>, Enter
(And like, if you have the file, you can always ^C ^V the character, if say you don't know how to IME, or you don't know what the name of the char is, etc.…)
Might as well just get a dedicated CSV→USV converter, though.
(I have a variant of this problem in JSON→YAML … usually I just shove one into the other & pray, akin to your sed solution.)
There is value in the delimiter simply being a key on practically any keyboard in existence. Anything that involves something more complicated than just pushing a single button on a keyboard (this includes IMEs) is a non-starter, because convenience is a virtue.
My point is that this is merely a more stringent argument; it's now "on a keyboard, and cannot involve dead keys, etc." … which now excludes classic CSV, too, which requires two keys to enter a double quote. (Shift+')
Again, it does require more keys, and it is certainly not convenient, but n keys to me is still n keys. The real question is why one isn't using a proper tool to enter the data, and is instead encoding it by hand, which, again, even for a classic CSV, is basically something I've never done. (… because why would one?)