Question: Regarding the stability of the program and ensuring the functioning of the system, how safe is it to use characters such as ¦, §or ‡for complex sequences of line separators? Can I hope that I will not encounter any problems in a program that does not read this data correctly?
I work in the system using C # code, in which I have to store a rather complex set of information on one line. The readability of this line is necessary only on the computer side, end users should see the information only after it has been analyzed by appropriate methods. Since some of the data in these rows will be collections of varying sizes, I use different delimiters to determine which parts of the row correspond to a particular level of organization. Enough cases when standard sets, | and similar ilk have been exhausted. I counted two-char delimiters, for example: # or; |, but I felt that it would be very inefficient. There is probably not a big performance difference when storing with one char character compared to two characters, but when I have the option to select a smaller option,just wrong to choose a larger one.
So, I decided to use a character set such as a double dagger and a section. They occupy only one char, and they definitely will not appear in the actual text that I will keep, so they will not be confused with anything.
But character encoding is complicated. While visibility to the end user is pointless (since they, in fact, do not see it), I have recently been concerned about how the programs on the system will read it. The string is stored in one database, while a separate program is responsible for encoding and decoding the string into different types of objects for the rest of the application to work. And if something needs to be written in one way, maybe another is written, then perhaps the whole system will fail, and I cannot let this happen. Is it safe to use these types of characters for background separators?