What's the best separator/delimiter character(s) for a plaintext db file?

Question

What's the best separator/delimiter character(s) for a plaintext db file?

I considered using |, ,, <TAB>, ;, etc. But they all seem to be possible to break when the nearby entries have special enough characters.

So, the experienced database users, what delimiter character(s) do you suggest to use?

Answer 1

Well, there are few separator characters in US-ASCII, hex 1c, 1d, 1e and 1f. The plain text shouldn't contain them.

1c  FS  ␜  ^\  File Separator
1d  GS  ␝  ^]  Group Separator
1e  RS  ␞  ^^  Record Separator
1f  US  ␟  ^_  Unit Separator