Let's say we are receiving some special characters in the header part of a file. How would you mitigate or handle this scenario?

When a file header contains unexpected special characters, the first step is to identify the encoding and the source of the data. I would start by reading the header bytes and attempting to decode them using common encodings (UTF‑8, ISO‑8859‑1, Windows‑1252). If decoding fails, I would fall back to a binary scan for known header signatures or magic numbers. Once the encoding is determined, I sanitize the header by stripping or escaping non‑printable characters, or by replacing them with a placeholder such as a question mark. If the header is part of a structured format (e.g., CSV, JSON, Parquet), I would validate it against a predefined schema; any deviation would trigger an error log and a retry or skip logic. For production systems, I would implement a wrapper that logs the raw header, the applied sanitization, and the outcome, so that downstream consumers receive a clean, predictable header. This approach ensures robustness against malformed input while preserving as much useful information as possible.