将ascii和二进制数据存储在单个制表符分隔的文件中

I've fallen into a situation where it would be advantageous to store both ascii and binary data within a tab-delimited file. My initial attempts were horrendous. Is this even worth pursuing? Any advice? I'll need to be able to cleanly parse the resulting tab-delimited file easily. Down stream, this data is going into a MySQLdb. And it would be nice to have the binary data stored within the db.I've fallen into a situation where it would be