A quick and easy way to generate WTF code is to find some deceptively simple problem that’s been well solved, and reimplement a naive solution to the problem.

Ryan found this attempt to handle HTML encoding of key characters. This code is VB.NET, which is important to keep in mind, since the Framework provides a variety of methods to do this correctly. 

Function HTMLEncode(ByVal Text As String) As String

   Dim i As Short
   Dim acode As Short
   Dim repl As String

   HTMLEncode = Text

   For i = Len(HTMLEncode) To 1 Step -1
       acode = Asc(Mid(HTMLEncode, i, 1))
       Select Case acode
           Case 32
               repl = " "
           Case 34
               repl = """
           Case 38
               repl = "&"
           Case 60
               repl = "<"
           Case 62
               repl = ">"
           Case 32 To 127
               ' do not consider alphanumeric chars
           Case Else
               repl = "&#" & CStr(acode) & ";"
       End Select
       If Len(repl) Then
           HTMLEncode = Left(HTMLEncode, i - 1) & repl & Mid(HTMLEncode, i + 1)
           repl = ""
       End If
   Next
End Function

This has a little bit of everything ugly, including the old style VB returns (for those not so “blessed”, VB lets you return values from a function by simply treating the function name as a variable).

The use of Asc to get the integer representation of the character is a subtle bug. The function is deprecated, and not going to return an ASCII code point, but whatever code page is configured for the system. There are cases where SomeChar <> Chr(Asc(SomeChar)) (example);

But this is simply an ugly and lazy HTML encoding function. To really ascend to full WTF, we need to see how they decode it. 

Function HTMLDecode(ByVal html As String) As String

   Dim i As Integer

   HTMLDecode = html

   Do
       ' search the next ampersand, exit if no more
       i = InStr(i + 1, HTMLDecode, "&")
       If i = 0 Then Exit Do

       If StrComp(Mid(HTMLDecode, i, 6), "&nbsp;", CompareMethod.Text) = 0 Then
           HTMLDecode = Left(HTMLDecode, i - 1) & " " & Mid(HTMLDecode, i + 6)
       ElseIf StrComp(Mid(HTMLDecode, i, 6), "&quot;", CompareMethod.Text) = 0 Then
           HTMLDecode = Left(HTMLDecode, i - 1) & """" & Mid(HTMLDecode, i + 6)
       ElseIf StrComp(Mid(HTMLDecode, i, 5), "&amp;", CompareMethod.Text) = 0 Then
           HTMLDecode = Left(HTMLDecode, i - 1) & "&" & Mid(HTMLDecode, i + 5)
       ElseIf StrComp(Mid(HTMLDecode, i, 4), "&lt;", CompareMethod.Text) = 0 Then
           HTMLDecode = Left(HTMLDecode, i - 1) & "<" & Mid(HTMLDecode, i + 4)
       ElseIf StrComp(Mid(HTMLDecode, i, 4), "&gt;", CompareMethod.Text) = 0 Then
           HTMLDecode = Left(HTMLDecode, i - 1) & ">" & Mid(HTMLDecode, i + 4)
       End If

   Loop

End Function

The true beauty of this function pair is that they aren’t reversible. A carriage return in the string would be rendered as &#13;. When you decode the string, it stays &#13;. The same problem arises for “smart quotes”, various dashes, or certain currency symbols- all things that might appear if someone copy/pastes from a word-processor.

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