(Mirror of a comment I wrote on a GitHub issue, responding to someone who was wondering how to parse the SVG path command a8 8 0 100-16 8 8 0 000 16, which looks at first glance like mangled data.)

This arc command is correct and standards-conformant SVG; see SVG 1.1 §8.3.9 for an exhaustive grammar, but the gist of it is that you can condense a lot.