With a title like that, you know it's time once again visit the wonderful world of exceptions. Our first (yes, first; it's a two-for-one day!) example is from production code that Valdas found which demonstrates a very perverse (yet intriguing) way of abusing not only try/catch blocks, but regular exceptions as well ... 

public boolean quote_string_checker (String stringtoscan) {
  boolean testval = true;

  try
  {
    Pattern p = Pattern.compile("[a-z]");
    for(int i=0;i<stringtoscan.length();i++)
    {
      char  chartoscan=stringtoscan.charAt(i);  
      //Matcher m = p.matcher(chartoscan);
      //String s=""+chartoscan;

      String c=Character.toString(chartoscan);
      Matcher m=p.matcher(c); 
      testval = m.matches();

      if (testval==false) break; 
    
    }
  }   
  catch (java.util.regex.PatternSyntaxException e)
  {
     testval = false;
  }
  return testval;
}

And our second example is from Dan Rahn, whose colleague shows us how easy it is to simulate everyone's favorite On Error Resume Next using C# (instead, of course, checking for .IsNull) ... 

try
{
  try{email.ConfigValue = row.Email.ToString();}
  catch{email.ConfigValue ="";}
  try{loginNameText.ConfigValue = row.LoginName.ToString();}
  catch{loginNameText.ConfigValue ="";}
  try{fullNameTextBox.ConfigValue = row.Name.ToString();}
  catch{fullNameTextBox.ConfigValue ="";}
  try{companyTextBox.ConfigValue = row.Company.ToString();}
  catch{companyTextBox.ConfigValue ="";}
  try{phoneTextBox.ConfigValue = row.Phone.ToString();}
  catch{phoneTextBox.ConfigValue ="";}
  try{addressTextBox.ConfigValue = row.Address.ToString();}
  catch{addressTextBox.ConfigValue ="";}
  try{enableUserCheckBox.Checked = !row.Disabled;}
  catch{enableUserCheckBox.Checked = false;}
  try{passwordTextBox.ConfigValue ="******";}
  catch{passwordTextBox.ConfigValue ="******";}
}
finally
{ 
  this.IsDirty = false;
}

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