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> I don't understand this? A tab is a tab?

I think the parent meant that a problem could be if data itself contains a tab character, causing an offset during parsing.

> I don't understand this? A tab is a tab?

How do you differentiate between tabs that the logger generates, and tabs inside log messages? You need to escape the tabs inside messages. This problem exists with any character delimited format (e.g. csv).

They should compress well.

In fact, they compress to about a 3% of their size. Since they really only exist in text file form for a limited period of time before being moved on to a separate logging system, their exploded size isn't much of a concern.