Assuming I can expect a wide range of the available barcodes out in the wild, what is a good (i.e., safe) utf-8 character to delimit strings sent from iOS to a Java server (and on to SQL, but we can assume the server will break it up before SQL)?
I was going with ":" between strings and ";" at the end. ";" at the end seems safe so far, but you run into problems quickly with ":", for instance in web URLs.
It really depends on the kinds of barcodes you are going to send. If they are GTIN/EAN/UPC hen anything bu numbers will be fine. For everything else I wouldn't delimit, but upload in a structured fomat like XML or JSON and have the contents be propertly encoded, i.e. base64 in JSON or CDATA in XML.