What is a more unique delimiter than comma for separating strings?

I have seen unusal characters used as delimiters, even unusal character combinarions like -|::|-, but eventhough they are more unlikely to occur, they still can.

You have basically two options if you want to make it water tight:

1: Use a character that is impossible to type, like the '\0' character:

Join:

string combined = string.Join("\0", inputArray);

Split:

string[] result = combined.Split('\0');

2: Escape the string and use an escaped character as delimiter, like url encoding the values and use & as delimiter:

Join:

string combined = string.Join("&", inputArray.Select<string,string>(System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlEncode).ToArray());

Split:

string[] result = combined.Split('&').Select<string,string>(System.Web.HttpUtility.UrlDecode).ToArray();

The best solution is to stick to commas and introduce support for character escaping. Whatever character you select will eventually need to be entered so you may aswell provide support for this.

Think backslases + double quotes inside double quoted strings.

Don't pick a character like backtick because some users might not know how to type it in...

I don't think I've willingly self-delimited a collection of strings since I stopped using C. There's just no need for it in a "modern" language, and - while trivial - the number of edge cases are enough to annoy you to death.

Store them in a List<string> or string[] and serialize/deserialize them. Use XML if you want human readability or interop - or binary serialze them if you don't. You can encrypt the output easily either way, and there's no ambiguity or create your own escaping routines needed.

In C#, it's less LOC and takes less time to write than this answer did. There's no excuse to rolling your own solution.

| would be next on my list and is often used as an alternative to CSV. google "pipe delimited" and you will find many examples.

string[] items = new string[] {"Uno","Dos","Tres"};

string toEncrypt = String.Join("|", items);

items = toEncrypt.Split(new char[] {'|'}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

foreach(string s in items)
  Console.WriteLine(s);

And since everyone likes to be a critic about the encoding and not provide the code, here is one way to encode the text so your | delim won't collide.

string[] items = new string[] {"Uno","Dos","Tres"};

for (int i = 0; i < items.Length; i++)
    items[i] = Convert.ToBase64String(Encoding.UTF8.GetBytes(items[i]));

string toEncrypt = String.Join("|", items);

items = toEncrypt.Split(new char[] {'|'}, StringSplitOptions.RemoveEmptyEntries);

foreach (string s in items)
     Console.WriteLine(Encoding.UTF8.GetString(Convert.FromBase64String(s)));