There was a long period of my life that I thought .csv meant cemicolon separated because all I saw was cemicolon separated files and I had no idea of the pain.

Although it is spelled "semicolon," so that doesn't quite fit.

CMYK -- Cyan, Magenta, Yellow, blacK :)

(of course it originally stood for "key", but you don't see that much anymore)

Not sure if they still do this, but Klarna would send us ", " separated files. If there wasn't a space after the comma then it was to be read as a decimal point. Most of the CSV parser don't/didn't allow you to specify multi-character separators. In the end I just accepted that we had one field for krona and for öre and most fields would need to have a leading space removed.

Microsoft did this very extensively. Many Non-English versions of Excel do save CSV-files with a semicolon as a separator and it probably was handled differently too in normal Excel files. But it goes even further, it affected their scripting languages even to this day with newer languages like their BI script (forgot the name of the language). For example, parameters of function calls aren't separated by ',' anymore and ';' is used instead. But only in the localized versions.

That of course means that you have to translate these scripts depending on the locale set in your office suite, otherwise they are full of syntax errors...

Many English languages use ';' to end statements instead of '.'.

Many European languages use '.' to end statements, Prolog (France) for example, but use ';' to separate arguments.

There are better separators included in ASCII, but not used as often: 28 File Separator, 29 Group Separator, 30 Record Separator and 31 Unit Separator.

TSV should do it for you. Been there done that.