What is a more unique delimiter than comma for separating strings?

Question

I have several textboxes where users can enter information into them. This can include commas, so I can't use the standard comma delimited strings.

What is a good delimiter to denote that strings should be separated based on that character that isn't typically used by users in their writings? I'm going to be combining these fields into a string string and passing them off to my Encryption method I have. After I decrypt them I need to be able to reliably separate them.

I'm using C# if it matters.

Answer 1

| would be next on my list and is often used as an alternative to CSV. google "pipe delimited" and you will find many examples.

string[] items = new string[] {"Uno","Dos","Tres"};  string toEncrypt = String.Join("|", items);  items = toEncrypt.Split(new char[] {'|'}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);  foreach(string s in items)   Console.WriteLine(s); 

And since everyone likes to be a critic about the encoding and not provide the code, here is one way to encode the text so your | delim won't collide.

string[] items = new string[] {"Uno","Dos","Tres"};  for (int i = 0; i < items.Length; i++)     items[i] = Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(items[i]));  string toEncrypt = String.Join("|", items);  items = toEncrypt.Split(new char[] {'|'}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);  foreach (string s in items)      Console.WriteLine(Encoding.UTF8.GetString(Convert.FromBase64String(s))); 

Answer 2

I have seen unusal characters used as delimiters, even unusal character combinarions like -|::|-, but eventhough they are more unlikely to occur, they still can.

You have basically two options if you want to make it water tight:

1: Use a character that is impossible to type, like the '\0' character:

Join:

string combined = string.Join("\0", inputArray); 

Split:

string[] result = combined.Split('\0'); 

2: Escape the string and use an escaped character as delimiter, like url encoding the values and use & as delimiter:

Join:

string combined = string.Join("&", inputArray.Select<string,string>(System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode).ToArray()); 

Split:

string[] result = combined.Split('&').Select<string,string>(System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlDecode).ToArray();