The Digital Data Feed Export can be set to have a inter-field delimiter of pipe, comma or tab.

But clients routinely send data (such as page ID's or product ID's or MMC's) that can contain pipes, commas or tabs.

This causes problems when attempting to load (for example) a pipe delimited DDF file where some of the field values (such as MMC's) contain pipes. It has been suggested that in the DDF IBM should consider escaping delimiters that are part of a data value, or enclosing values in quotes, or otherwise following one of the standard techniques for text delimited data files.

This would help prevent problems when loading the DDF if the client is passing values that match the inter-field delimiter.