One thing not mentioned here is using regular expressions. Use regexes liberally to process all data [1] because eventually it will converge to it and if you ha

One thing not mentioned here is using regular expressions. Use regexes liberally to process all data [1] because eventually it will converge to it and if you haven’t looked around for a solution involving regexes, [2] you’re not working on the really hard problems. Oh, don’t bother writing comments about regexes. They’re pretty much self-explanatory once the expression itself is beyond 10 characters long. If regular expressions seem too tame to you, write all your business logic in SQL that’s contained in a long stored procedure. Prefix the name of the stored procedures with “HBD_” (HereBeDragons) so that your future self doesn’t get hurt. For added pain, use triggers that will invoke stored procedures, but not everywhere. In this case, inconsistency is the name of the game. [1]: https://xkcd.com/208/ https://xkcd.com/208/ [2]: https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open-tags-except-xhtml-self-contained-tags#1732454 https://stackoverflow.com/questions/1732348/regex-match-open...