newlineseparated

Newlineseparated is a descriptive term for data that uses newline characters as a primary delimiter. In practice, it often refers to text files where records are separated by line breaks, and fields within a line are separated by another delimiter; in some variants, each field occupies its own line.

Two principal variants are common: newline-delimited records, where every line is a complete record; and newline-delimited fields, where each field is on a separate line. The term is informal and umbrella-like rather than a formal specification.

Relation to existing formats: newline-delimited records underpin many simple log files and CSV-like text, and there is a widely used concrete variant called newline-delimited JSON (NDJSON), which stores one JSON object per line. Newlineseparated thus covers a family of simple, line-based data conventions rather than a single standard.

Advantages include straightforward streaming and incremental processing, easy appending to files, and strong compatibility with line-oriented tooling. Data can be human-readable and edit-friendly for line-based workflows.

Limitations involve handling embedded newlines or delimiters within fields, which requires escaping or quoting conventions; lack of universal field syntax across implementations; poor suitability for complex nested data; and potential interoperability issues across tools and languages.

Example: a newline-delimited record file might contain:

Alice,30,London

Bob,25,Paris

If fields may contain the delimiter, an escaping rule or alternative quoting is necessary; NDJSON provides a more concrete approach with per-line JSON objects.

See also: NDJSON, CSV, TSV, line-delimited formats.