In this kind of situation where there's a bug or limitation or some kind of issue with a language function we usually create a wrapper to handle the whatever ru

In this kind of situation where there's a bug or limitation or some kind of issue with a language function we usually create a wrapper to handle the whatever rules we have internally within the company. In this case the empty string that is supposed to be NULL should be handled within that wrapper function. One function to modify instead of several places in the application.