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Comment by threeducks | Hacker News Reader

A common source of "NULL" strings are CSVs. I personally had to deal with a database that only understood NULLs correctly when using QUOTE_NOTNULL, which was added to Python just last year: https://github.com/python/cpython/issues/113732

I've also heard of a fun database where the user "Geoffrey" was truncated to "G". I wonder why? (Hint: End of file)

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> I've also heard of a fun database where the user "Geoffrey" was truncated to "G". I wonder why? (Hint: End of file)

Sorry, I don't buy that one. There's no way the ascii string "eof" - especially lower-cased - would be interpreted as the C macro EOF, which is typically represented as the int -1. Sounds like a tall tale unless you've got proof.

I could see a poorly coded stringly parsed interface (think sql) triggering on a mid span character sequence. but I agree, it would have to be a real mess of an interface. For example the client uses "eof" to separate or end queries.

I first had to figure out why the G stayed put if it was being treated as last line... I've seen some terrible things and wouldn't doubt that a lot of pages in say the travel industry have a 2%+ failure rate at recording a signup.

There are more than a few legacy databases where a person's first name wouldn't be lowercased. I worked for a university awhile back, this is post-2010, and names were stored uppercase.

Sorry, I don't have first-hand proof. But it seems that this issue is not rare: https://old.reddit.com/r/programminghorror/comments/4g70lj/s...

CSV will go down as one of the greatest mistakes in computer programming.

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