6.6.4 Communicating Delimiters

To communicate a primary Delimiters in a Cell, such a Cell shall not be enclosed in double quote characters. Instead the Delimiters shall be immediately preceded by an escaping code.

To escape a tab character contained in a text string, the escaping code is the backslash character (Unicode U+005C). Therefore the string A[TAB]B would have to be communicated as A\[TAB]B (with [TAB] representing the tabulator).

To escape a pipe character contained in a text string, the escaping code is a double backslash character (Unicode U+005C). Therefore the string A|B would have to be communicated as A\\|B. 

To communicate a backslash character, three backslash characters need to be communicated. Therefore the string A\B would have to be communicated as A\\\B.

This “escaping mechanism” must be used for all special characters in all Cells, whether those Cells allow multiple values or not. A non-escaped pipe character in a single-value cell is, consequently, an error.

For the avoidance of doubt, escaping a character that should not be escaped, or not escaping a character that should have been escaped, will lead to an invalid sales/usage report.