1. A method to be executed at least in part in a computing device for protecting an application against malformed input data, the method comprising: defining a schema for a well-formed data file containing input data; providing input to a parser module for parsing the schema, the input to the parser module originating from two or more sources, one of the sources including instructions for custom parsing of the data file into validation code; generate executable code based on the schema; validating the input data using the executable code; and providing validation results to the application, wherein the validation results include a quantitative report and a qualitative report of validation errors, the quantitative report including a total number of validation errors, the qualitative report including a severity level for each validation error, and wherein the input data is accepted when the severity level of each validation error does not exceed a first predetermined acceptance level and when the number of validation errors does not exceed a second predetermined acceptance level.