(2) Many of my columns are free-form text containing commas, carriage returns, new lines, tab, vertical tabs and file separator (0x1c). Occasionally, text is in UCS-2/UTF-16 or uses UTF-8 and foreign characters (a non-trivial quantity of the text I process is in French for example.)

(If you read between the lines here, some columns can contain MLLP-encoded HL7 messages, others contain free-form text and I'm in the medical field.)