Most common escape character is \
with “” used by Excel to “escape” a double quote
what other common escape characters has anyone else seen in CSV/TSV type files?
Since there’s no official spec for such a thing the best you can hope for is to handle what are the de facto standards which is what Excel & Access handle.
Nearly every app I’ve encountered shoots for that as their measure of “compatible” and thats what I based my reader on.
And I crafted some seriously ugly Excel spreadsheets and exported them as CSV just to test it.
At the time Open Office barfed on a couple but it reads them now,