I remember working on an airline reservation system coding a Passenger Name Record (PNR) parsing system. One of our biggest concerns was the special characters embedded in the PNR which caused the code to fail as it wasn't intelligent enough to detect real data from the special characters. Of course, we got around the scenario by coding to the bad data rather than fixing the bad data or normalizing the data.
Fast forward 15yrs. I'm working in healthcare IT and building a solution that involves parsing data from a third party provider. One of the challenges of parsing data is ...guess what...special characters in the data causing the code to break.
Why do we not stop to fix the data and end up writing code to work around the issue? Time and time again!
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Hi Saurin came across your blog, I can relate to your frustrations, all of us have done this several times, tools have got much better now. From substring to regular expressions and EDI to Xml. One more thing same data may get processed by multiple systems and garbage for one system could be treasure for another.
Anyways congratulations for starting this blog.
Pranav
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