[dev] Best way to serialize data

I was wondering about which way would be the easiest/simplest to
serialize data, f.e. being read via a file or stdin (data being a
table of x rows and y columns, each cell a string). I thought of
using NULL bytes as cell delimiters and newline characters as row
delimiters. This way it wouldn't be possible to use \0 nor \n
inside the "cells", but I couldn't think of a simpler solution.

Something like:
a \0 b \0 c \n
d \0 e \0 f \n
...

What would you recommend? How'd you do it?

Reason why I'm asking is because I was wondering how a dmenu-alike
utility would read data, where each items has multiple values, not
just one. Kinda like a search utility for table-structured data.

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Džen