It could be also, like X Æ A-12, or any of the following real names of real persons:

Ben Dover, Hashtag Follow, Destinee Hooker, Khumalo Tiny Dick, Guy Nutter

Guilherme Crabogiale Fuck, Jurassic Park, Beautiful Existence, Tokyo Sexwale, Mike Litoris, Batman Bin Suparman, Jesus Condom

Mrs. Rape, Kash Register, Donald Duck, Robert Fagot, Tatiana Vagina, Hitler Mussolini.

That's so weird to me. It means that somewhere someone is matching the string "null" and converting it into an actual null value.

What is generally happening in these cases is that data is getting stringified, with `null` becoming the string "null" (which is a common output for string formatting a null in various languages).

This output is is then later re-parsed, and to try to restore null inputs back to being null, the code matches on the string "null", ignoring the fact that that could have been a valid string itself.

It's pretty believable to me that _some_ Java deserialization library from the early oughts totally does this as a default behavior.

Not all data structures are nullable or null reference is undesirable. In this case you can use the null object pattern https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Null_object_pattern#Descriptio...

I suspect some batch processing job with a CSV dump is the culprit behind a lot of bad treatment of strings.