Signal character for file reading?

Question

I am writing a simple Java applet for my friend. Is there a character I can use that will never be practically used from the keyboard or almost never when taking notes as a signal? I need to record a name, and then a note for that name. But the note may have newlines so I cannot just use newlines here.

Answer 1

You could escape any newlines in the note if you want to use newlines as a delimiter. What would be more sensible, though, would be to just use a well-defined, lightweight file format that already exists, like CSV.

If you really want to go rogue and bash together your own format, though, the traditional choice is NUL, a.k.a. \0 or \u0000.