You have some text, and need to replace every sequence of spaces with a single space. E.g., My text becomes My text. Now, if you're most of us, you ignore the famous quote and reach straight for regexes.

But Samuel's co-worker isn't most of us.

Greg's co-worker really wanted to make sure that a variable was correctly set to true or false. So they did this:

if (isValid == true)
{
	isValid = true;
}
else
{
	isValid = false;
}

Meta-programming- programs which generate programs- is a delightful hobby, but usually shouldn't be used in production code. Usually. I mean, if you're working in LISP, 90% of your program is going to be macros.

But if you're using PHP and JavaScript, there's good odds that someone you work with has decided to combine these two tastes together to create something nobody wants to taste.

Zeke sends us a C# snippet from an extract-transform-load process his company uses. It's… special.

private void ResizeColumn(string table, string column, int minSize)
{
    if(null == _connection) return;

    string sqlReadSize = "SELECT DATA_LENGTH,DATA_TYPE,DATA_PRECISION,DATA_SCALE FROM USER_TAB_COLS WHERE TABLE_NAME = '" + table.ToUpper() + "' AND COLUMN_NAME = '" + column.ToUpper() + "'";
    string data_length = "";
    string data_type = "";
    string data_precision = "";
    string data_scale = "";
    string sizeInfo = minSize.ToString();
    
    IDataReader r = null;

    try
    {
        r = _connection.DbAccessor.ExecuteSqlText.ExecuteReader(sqlReadSize);
        if(null != r && r.Read())
        {
            if(!r.IsDBNull(0)) data_length = Convert.ToString(r[0]);
            if(!r.IsDBNull(1)) data_type = Convert.ToString(r[1]);
            if(!r.IsDBNull(2)) data_precision = Convert.ToString(r[2]);
            if(!r.IsDBNull(3)) data_scale = Convert.ToString(r[3]);

            r.Close();
            r = null;

        }
    }
    catch(Exception ex)
    {
        System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(ex.Message);
        return;
    }
    finally
    {
        if(null != r)
        {
            r.Close();
            r = null;
        }
    }
    if(data_type == "NUMBER")
    {
        return;
    }

    if(data_type == "DATE")
    {
        return;
    }

    if(data_type == "CLOB")
    {
        return;
    }

    if(data_type == "BLOB")
    {
        return;
    }
    
    if(minSize <= Convert.ToInt32(data_length))
    {
        return;
    }

    string sqlAlterSize = "ALTER TABLE " + table + " modify " 
        + column.ToUpper() + " " + data_type + "(" + sizeInfo + ")";


    try
    {
        _connection.DbAccessor.ExecuteSqlText.ExecuteScalar(sqlAlterSize);
    }
    catch(Exception ex)
    {
        System.Diagnostics.Debug.WriteLine(ex.Message);
        return;
    }
}

When I first saw Nick L's submission, I thought to myself, "This is just decompiled code, so of course the names are bad."

 Public Function tF7q2() As String
     Dim SelectedtF7q2 As String = Request.QueryString("tF7q2")
     tF7q2 = SelectedtF7q2
 End Function

Ulvhamne sends us some bad code that, well, I think at this point we should really coin a name for this particular anti-pattern.

    @Override
    public int getNumOfItemsInDataContainer(int parDataId)
    {
        int numberOfItems = 0;
        for (Integer x : myTransactionDataContainerMap.keySet())
        {
                numberOfItems ++;
        }
        return numberOfItems;
    }