Cookie-jar format is used by the fortune(1) program for its database of random quotes. It is appropriate for records that are just bags of unstructured text. It simply uses newline followed by %% (or sometimes newline followed by %) as a record separator. Example5.3 is an example section from a file of email signature quotes:
Example5.3.A fortune file example.
"Among the many misdeeds of British rule in India, history will look upon the Act depriving a whole nation of arms as the blackest." -- Mohandas Gandhi, "An Autobiography", pg 446 % The people of the various provinces are strictly forbidden to have in their possession any swords, short swords, bows, spears, firearms, or other types of arms. The possession of unnecessary implements makes difficult the collection of taxes and dues and tends to foment uprisings. -- Toyotomi Hideyoshi, dictator of Japan, August 1588 % "One of the ordinary modes, by which tyrants accomplish their purposes without resistance, is, by disarming the people, and making it an offense to keep arms." -- Supreme Court Justice Joseph Story, 1840
It is good practice to accept whitespace after % when looking for record delimiters. This helps cope with human editing mistakes. It's even better practice to use %%, and ignore all text from %% to end-of-line.
The cookie-jar separator was originally %%\n. I wanted something a bit more visible than % would have been. In fact, any stuff after the %% is treated as a comment (or at least that's how I wrote it).
Simple cookie-jar format is appropriate for pieces of text that have no natural ordering, distinguishable structure above word level, or search keys other than their text context.
