OK but I also think you&#x27;re conflating two issues: text vs. binary on the one hand, and delimiter vs length-prefixed on the other.   I like DJB&#x27;s netstring scheme, which is an ASCII length-prefixed encoding:<p><pre><code>    3:foo,
    10:0123456789,
</code></pre>
Text formats usually have delimiters (like HTTP headers), and binary formats usually have length prefixes, but technically they&#x27;re orthogonal.<p>I&#x27;ve never seen a fixed-width text format for numbers in practice.