Most database and spreadsheet programs are able to read or save data in a delimited format.
[4] Any character may be used to separate the values, but the most common delimiters are the comma, tab, and colon.
This prevents the comma in the actual field value (Bloggs, Fred; Doe, Jane; etc.)
[citation needed] Due to their widespread use, comma- and tab-delimited text files can be opened by several kinds of applications, including most spreadsheet programs and statistical packages, sometimes even without the user designating which delimiter has been used.
Comma- and space-separated formats often suffer from this problem, since in many contexts those characters are legitimate parts of a data field.
With rising prevalence of web sites and other applications that store snippets of code in databases, simply using a " which occurs in every hyperlink and image source tag simply is not sufficient to avoid this type of collision.