Finding bad code in some old system you’ve come to maintain is one thing. Being tasked with adding bad code to a new system is a whole other type of pain. Paul G was lucky enough to experience this first hand.

After an hour or two of arguing that there is a better way of doing this, Paul wrote, I was overruled by the longest serving developer and, as a result, forced to write the ‘Remove Special Chars Except Quote Ampersand Apostrophe Open Bracket Close Bracket Comma Hyphen Full Stop Comma Forward Slash’ function. Seriously. 

public static string //ED: Linebreaks added as not break site layout
   RemoveSpecialCharsExceptQuote  
   AmpersandApostropheOpenBracketCloseBracketComma
   HyphenFullStopCommaForwardSlash (string p_string)
{            
    //34 | 38 | 39 | 40 | 41 44| 45 | 46 | 47
    StringBuilder sb = new StringBuilder();
    for(int i=0; i<p_string.Length; i++)
    {
        int chrCode = Convert.ToInt32(p_string[i]);
        if ((chrCode < 15)
            || (chrCode > 64 && chrCode < 91)
            || (chrCode == 34)
            || (chrCode == 38)
            || (chrCode == 39)
            || (chrCode == 40)
            || (chrCode == 41)
            || (chrCode == 45)
            || (chrCode == 46)
            || (chrCode == 47)
            || (chrCode > 96 && chrCode < 123)
            || (chrCode > 191 && chrCode < 256))
        {
            sb.Append(p_string.Substring(i, 1));
        }
        else if ((chrCode == 39)|| (chrCode == 96))
        {
            sb.Append(Convert.ToChar(39));
        }
    }

    return sb.ToString();
}

Paul adds: every string in the system is routed through these functions and accessed via an ObjectFormatter class with a single method (“Format”) which has a single argument (“Object obj”). The Format method is called via remoting, looks up the object’s type in an XML configuration file, and calls the configured formatter via reflection.

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