This is all a big part of the reason why I personally advocate using a standardized text-based object serialization format (like YAML) for these sorts of things. In particular:
* Still text based and human-readable, which helps for debugging/troubleshooting
* Still text-based and machine-readable, so it's inherently cross-platform (assuming that all said platforms agree on their text encoding)
* Still less troublesome than piping arbitrary text through `grep` or `sed` or `awk` or what have you
* Still provides the "everything is an object" benefit that's lost with arbitrary text streams
* Still orientable around streams of data, at least for YAML (by using the document delimiter)
* Still text based and human-readable, which helps for debugging/troubleshooting * Still text-based and machine-readable, so it's inherently cross-platform (assuming that all said platforms agree on their text encoding) * Still less troublesome than piping arbitrary text through `grep` or `sed` or `awk` or what have you * Still provides the "everything is an object" benefit that's lost with arbitrary text streams * Still orientable around streams of data, at least for YAML (by using the document delimiter)