As I mentioned a couple weeks back, I love it when you can extrapolate how the rest of a system must be designed based on seeing of one little piece of code. Betul sent this in and I have to say, I'm not so sure I want to even fathom how the rest of the system must look .... and sadly, this is not part of some data cleaning, migration, transfer, or other similar script. It's actual, real-live production code for determining if a string is null ... 

public static boolean IsNull(String str)
{
      boolean isnull = false;
      if(
         (str == null) ||
         (str.equals("__")) ||
         (str.equals("__null")) ||
         (str.equals("_null_")) ||
         //Added for Issue #107724
         (str.equals("_null_null")) ||
         (str.equals("null__")) ||
         (str.equals("null__null")) ||
         //Added for Issue #126185
         (str.equals("null_null_")) ||
         (str.equals("null_null_null"))
       ) isnull = true;

      return isnull;
}
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