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Code Snippet Of the Day (CodeSOD) features interesting and usually incorrect code snippets taken from actual production code in a commercial and/or open source software projects.
There are some blocks of code that require a preamble, and an explanation of the code and its flow. Often you need to provide some broader context.
Sometimes, you get some code like Wolf found, which needs no explanation:
Jim was adding a feature to the backend. This feature updated a few fields on an object, and then handed the object off as JSON to the front-end.
Adding the feature seemed pretty simple, but when Jim went to check out its behavior in the front-end, he got validation errors. Something in the data getting passed back by his web service was fighting with the front end.
Robert was browsing through a little JavaScript used at his organization, and found this gem of type conversion.
Jul 19//use only for small numbers
function StringToInteger (str) {
var int = -1;
for (var i=0; i<=100; i++) {
if (i+"" == str) {
int = i;
break;
}
}
return int;
}You’ve got a decimal value- maybe. It could be nothing at all, and you need to handle that null gracefully. Fortunately for you, C# has “nullable types”, which make this task easy.
Ian P’s co-worker made this straightforward application of nullable types.
When Java added their streams API, they brought the power and richness of functional programming styles to the JVM, if we ignore all the other non-Java JVM languages that already did this. Snark aside, streams were a great addition to the language, especially if we want to use them absolutely wrong.
Like this code Miles found.
Your programming language is PHP, which represents datetimes as milliseconds since the epoch. Your database, on the other hand, represents datetimes as seconds past the epoch. Now, your database driver certainly has methods to handle this, but can you really trust that?
Nancy found some code which simply needs to check: for the past week, how many customers arrived each day?
When you deploy any sort of complicated architecture, like microservices, you also end up needing to deploy some way to route messages between all the various bits and bobs in your application. You could build this yourself, but you’ll usually use an off-the-shelf product, like Kafka or RabbitMQ.
This is the world Tina lives in. They have a microservice-based architecture, glued together with a RabbitMQ server. The various microservices need to connect to the RabbitMQ, and thus, they need to be able to check if that connection were successful.
Java has a boolean type, and of course it also has a parseBoolean method, which works about how you'd expect. It's worth noting that a string "true" (ignoring capitalization) is the only thing which is considered true, and all other inputs are false. This does mean that you might not always get the results you want, depending on your inputs, so you might need to make your own boolean parser.
Adam H has received the gift of legacy code. In this case, the code was written circa 2002, and the process has been largely untouched since. An outside vendor uploads an Excel spreadsheet to an FTP site. And yes, it must be FTP, as the vendor's tool won't do anything more modern, and it must be Excel because how else do you ship tables of data between two businesses?
Lena inherited some C++ code which had issues regarding a timeout. While skimming through the code, one block in particular leapt out. This was production code which had been running in this state for some time.
if((pFile) && (pFile != (FILE *)(0xcdcdcdcd))) {
fclose(pFile);
pFile = NULL;
}