Best way to handle delimited files

Question

So typically a CSV file uses a comma and the return character as it's field and line delimiters.

This runs into obvious problems with text which can contain both these characters.

Obviously there are options there (escaping them) but how do people handle this? Use different characters - pipes or tildas? Escape them? Not use delimited files, after all it's 2010 and we have XML now?

Looking at least effort for a decent chance of not seeing problems.

(Just to be clear, this is a question out of curiosity rather than something more solid - it's something I've come up against time and time again playing with data, always got round it but it normally feels a bit, well, dirty, and wondered what other people's experience was).