Personally, I like the ultra-simple nature of the file format, although it's true that sometimes you do want to have a file that contains the separators. That's possible to work around, however. In this fork of testscript, I've provided unquote as a standard primitive. It just removes the leading > from the start of each line. I also changed the txtar-c command so that you can ask it to do the quoting for you.

Perhaps that approach might work for the internal testscript code too.

@jayconrod @bcmills

Agree with @rogpeppe, the simplicity of this format is really valuable. I'd rather not add features to it.

@ianthehat mentioned another case that doesn't roundtrip correctly: files that don't end with a newline. As with the unquote feature above, he recommends processing these files before and after packing them into txtar (adding newlines to files before packing, removing newlines after).