I think you're right.

This request was prompted by an issue encounted in org-journal, and it probably exists in org-roam and other similar packages.

Ignoring blank lines sounds like a reasonable approach.

For more significant syntax violations such as your example, perhaps org-entry-get and other functions should raise errors instead of silently returning nil?

I'm going to investigate how it might be possible to initiate an org-lint if an exception situation was to arise in org-journal.

On February 7, 2024, Ihor Radchenko <yantar92@posteo.net> wrote:

Jason May <jmay@pobox.com> writes:

> Extraneous content (e.g. blank lines) in the PROPERTIES drawer
> cause =org-entry-get= to return nil without indication of any problem.
>
> Desired behavior: =org-entry-get= should be forgiving.
> It should ignore blank PROPERTIES lines, or any line with invalid
> syntax.
> A message to the *Warnings* buffer might be appropriate.

Blank lines in properties might be an ok change.
I am not so sure about invalid syntax.

Consider

:PROPERTIES:
:PROP1: val1
:PROP2: this line was
accidentally modified
:END:

Property drawer not being recognized is more likely to be noticed
compared to `org-entry-get' returning incomplete "this line was".

In any case, M-x org-lint will report problems with property drawers.

--
Ihor Radchenko // yantar92,
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