Writing a parser for a badly-specified format which is widely used is a terrifying prospect in any language. Okay so it's more terrifying in C than most other

Writing a parser for a badly-specified format which is widely used is a terrifying prospect in any language. Okay so it's more terrifying in C than most other things, but still, it's terrifying. Runaway memory consumption, weird Unicode behaviour etc. etc. etc. It's easy to think you don't have to worry about Unicode because your language's string types will handle it for you - but what do they do if the input contains invalid codepoints? You're writing a parser, you need to know - and possibly override it if that behaviour conflicts with the spec. Horrible business. Definitely not my favourite job.