The Daily WTF: Curious Perversions in Information Technology

Without Any Padding

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-07-27

Years ago, Aleshia W started a job in a VB.Net shop. There's a lot I could say about those kinds of environments, but I'd really just be padding out the article, so let's just get right to the code- which pads out a Year string.

Protected Function YearPadText(ByVal val As String) As String
    Dim valLen As Integer
    valLen = val.Len

    Select Case valLen
        Case 1
            val = val + "              "
        Case 2
            val = val + "             "
        Case 3
            val = val + "            "
        Case 4
            val = val + "           "
        Case 5
            val = val + "          "
        Case 6
            val = val + "         "
        Case 7
            val = val + "        "
        Case 8
            val = val + "       "
        Case 9
            val = val + "      "
        Case 10
            val = val + "     "
        Case 11
            val = val + "    "
        Case 12
            val = val + "   "
        Case 13
            val = val + "  "
        Case 14
            val = val + " "
    End Select
    Return val
End Function

17 comments - Last comment @ 2021-07-27

Ordering the Hash

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-07-26

Last week, we took a look at a hash array anti-pattern in JSON. This week, we get to see a Python version of that idea, with extra bonus quirks, from an anonymous submitter.

In this specific case, the code needed to handle CSV files. The order of the columns absolutely matters, and thus the developer needed to make sure that they always handled columns in the correct order. This led to code like this:

21 comments - Last comment @ 2021-07-27

Where You At?

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-07-22

Validating email addresses according to the actual email specification is more complicated than you usually think. Most homebrew validation tends to just get something that's relatively close, because hitting all the rules requires some fancy regex work. And honestly, for most applications, "pretty close to correct" is probably fine. If you actually care about collecting valid email addresses, you'll need to actually send mail to the address and have the user confirm receipt to "prove" that the email address is real, valid, and actually accessible.

Still, some "close enough" solutions are better than others. Jon found this C# code:

37 comments - Last comment @ 2021-07-27

Validate Freely

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-07-21

Validation highlights the evolution of a programmer as they gain experience. A novice programmer, when given a validation problem, will tend to treat the string like an array or use substrings and attempt to verify that the input is the correct format. A more experienced programmer is going to break out the regexes. A very experienced programmer is going to just find a library or built-in method that does it, because there are better ways to use your time.

Andrea provides a rare example of a developer on the cusp between regexes and built-in methods.

26 comments - Last comment @ 2021-07-26

Putting the File Out

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-07-20

There's a lot of room for disagreement in technology, but there's one universal, unchangeable truth: Oracle is the worst. But a second truth is that there's nothing so bad a programmer can't make it worse.

Someone at Ben's company needed to take data from a database and write it to a file. That file needed to have some specific formatting. So they used the best possible tool for the job: a PL/SQL stored procedure.

16 comments - Last comment @ 2021-07-22

The Hash Array

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-07-19

When Arbuzo joined a new team, they helpfully provided him some sample code to show him how to interact with their JSON API. It was all pretty standard-looking stuff. If, for example, they fetched a Customer object, it would have some fields about the customer, and an array containing links to orders that customer had made. One of the samples helpfully showed iterating across the orders array:

let i = 1;
while(cust.orders[i]) {
    //do stuff with cust.orders[i]
    i++;
}

24 comments - Last comment @ 2021-07-26

Just a Few Questions

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-07-15

Pete has had some terrible luck with the lead programmers he's worked with. He's had a few which are… well, they don't take feedback well. Like his current team lead, who absolutely doesn't let any of the other developers review or comment on his code. "Don't ask me questions, you should know this already," is a common refrain. Speaking of questions:

String q1 = form.getQ1()!=null?request.getParameter("question_" + form.getQ1().getId()):null;
String q2 = form.getQ2()!=null?request.getParameter("question_" + form.getQ2().getId()):null;
String q3 = form.getQ3()!=null?request.getParameter("question_" + form.getQ3().getId()):null;
String q4 = form.getQ4()!=null?request.getParameter("question_" + form.getQ4().getId()):null;
String q5 = form.getQ5()!=null?request.getParameter("question_" + form.getQ5().getId()):null;
String q6 = form.getQ6()!=null?request.getParameter("question_" + form.getQ6().getId()):null;
String q7 = form.getQ7()!=null?request.getParameter("question_" + form.getQ7().getId()):null;
String q8 = form.getQ8()!=null?request.getParameter("question_" + form.getQ8().getId()):null;
String q9 = form.getQ9()!=null?request.getParameter("question_" + form.getQ9().getId()):null;
String q10 = form.getQ10()!=null?request.getParameter("question_" + form.getQ10().getId()):null;
String q11 = form.getQ11()!=null?request.getParameter("question_" + form.getQ11().getId()):null;
String q12 = form.getQ12()!=null?request.getParameter("question_" + form.getQ12().getId()):null;                   
String q13 = form.getQ13()!=null?request.getParameter("question_" + form.getQ13().getId()):null;
String q14 = form.getQ14()!=null?request.getParameter("question_" + form.getQ14().getId()):null;
String q15 = form.getQ15()!=null?request.getParameter("question_" + form.getQ15().getId()):null;

38 comments - Last comment @ 2021-07-22

A Parser Par Excellence

by Remy Porter in CodeSOD on 2021-07-14

Jan's company has an application which needs to handle an Excel spreadsheet, because as I'm fond of pointing out, users love spreadsheets.

The JavaScript code which handles parsing the spreadsheet contains… some choices. These choices caused it to fail on any spreadsheet with more than twenty six columns, and it's not hard to see why.

32 comments - Last comment @ 2021-07-25