Should tabs be banned from tsvs in fwrite?

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Assessment

Difficulty
4/5
Estimated time
3-5 days
Newbie friendliness
25/100
Issue type
Feature
Clarity
Needs clarification
Activity status
Stale
Tech stack
r
Domain
data

Research direction

Start by reviewing the TSV standard linked in the issue and the existing fwrite behavior for fields containing tabs. A completed investigation should establish whether tabs must be rejected or escaped for compatibility, with the resulting behavior and tests or documentation clearly defined.

Written by the indexing model from the issue text.

Description

feature request fwrite

According to Wikipedia,

The IANA standard for TSV achieves simplicity by simply disallowing tabs within fields.

Yet fwrite works happily with tabs within fields. I don't have a clue how authoritative this standard is, and I can't construct an example where this becomes a problem with compatibility, but I'm guessing there exist parsers of tsvs that make the assumption in the 'standard', which would not parse some tsvs written with fwrite correctly.

Dominant language
R
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Avg merge
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Merged PRs (30d)
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