newformat format change

[Gustavo Niemeyer]

> I don't see any character encoding handling, and the escaping appears
> inconsistent (AFAIK, newlines and tabs are permitted in file_ids).
>
> It would probably be smart to define one function to write values to the
> file, and use that instead.  e.g.

As I tried hard to emphasise, this was a proof of concept to show
the points we were discussing. It's not supposed to be integrated
as is, nor to be completely correct.

-- 
Gustavo Niemeyer
http://niemeyer.net