My guess this behavior is based on the principle of being liberal as to what you accept, but be strict as to what you generate. There are enough 'broken' CSV generators, that being too strict as to what you accept will cause issues with not being able to import from some sources. If you really want to be strict, write your own program to do the import, then you can check for all the errors you want, including things that might be valid per the RFC, but are inconsistent data for your application. The SQLite Shell is really just a convenience tool and isn't supposed to be all things for all users.