alt Hacker NewsTangentially related, the only way for a Java properties file to be invalid is if it contains an invalid Unicode escape sequence (“\u” not followed by four digits, and not preceded by an odd number of “\”). After resolving Unicode escapes, any character sequence is a valid properties file.
I've had a program where some R code stuffs some input in an URL, fires it at a server, then reads the returned CSV. No error handling or validation is attempted.
As it happens, basically anything is a valid CSV.
If the input is wrong, the server responds with an XML error. This got interpreted as a CSV. Every line became a record, but no column headers were found so every expected field is null/NA. All these nulls get nicely sorted and processed, which causes more string errors, etc ... Mayhem ensues when thst stuff ends up in a database.