Has any one ever seen a backspace delimited flat file? My requirement is to parse such a file but I am not able to put a backspace character into a file to check if I am able to detect it.
Splitting shouldn't be any harder than using any other delimiter. It's just another character, after all. In Python, for instance:
>>> x = "apples\bbanana\bcoconut\bthese are delicious!"
>>> x.split('\b')
['apples', 'banana', 'coconut', 'these are delicious!']
Most languages use \b as the escape character for a backspace. If yours doesn't you can also include the ASCII control code for backspace itself, which is \x08.