Ok, there is more than one way to do it. I think fine.

I personally prefer fixed width font and no tabs within code. My normal program editor actually converts tabs to the appropriate number of spaces when I save the code to a file. I indent the code like I want. When I work in MS Visual Studio, it doesn't do that and I find it annoying - sometimes I want to take a MS .C file and use it on a Unix system and then we get into this "how many spaces does a tab mean?" thing. You see it as a plus. I see it as a hassle.

So I guess mileage varies. I have personally found the "|" (pipe character) to be a good field separator in many circumstances. When that doesn't work, then I go to full blown CSV with all the complications that involves. But there are some very good Perl modules that can parse this out albeit slower than simple split() or match global.