One question I have, name the countries which have comma's in their names?

Tabs are PERFECT separators. They are used all the time and programs have no trouble reading them. That is, if the tab is actually using character value 9 rather than just putting in a bunch of spaces (character 32). But even then a group of spaces can still be used.

Tabs, spaces, carriage returns, line feeds, etc... these are known as 'white space'. Google it up. They're very useful for not only formatting text, but for also reading it by computer. Since they're purpose is to separate different pieces of information in real language, it's simple for a computer to parse these characters to separate data.

Spreadsheet programs are very good at guessing the separating character but you also have manual control.

When I write code to read in text output (eg NEIC quake list) I write custom code. It's easy. It's even easier if the data is column formatted, in which case the separator is totally irrelevant.

Brian