I don't understand the question about empty values. A row with there empty values is just:
,,
And yeah, dealing with separators is annoying, but pretty much every reader supports quoted values and escapes (not every writer cares up add them, though).
In practice I use csv to process large amount of tabular data (like logs, events, etc) where I care about greppability and performance more than about potential for 0.001% of corrupted data. YMMV of course, if getting it 100% right is important use something else (JSON is not without sins too, consider that JSON numbers are often parsed as floats).
,,
And yeah, dealing with separators is annoying, but pretty much every reader supports quoted values and escapes (not every writer cares up add them, though).
In practice I use csv to process large amount of tabular data (like logs, events, etc) where I care about greppability and performance more than about potential for 0.001% of corrupted data. YMMV of course, if getting it 100% right is important use something else (JSON is not without sins too, consider that JSON numbers are often parsed as floats).