Recent CodeSOD

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.

Dec 2022

An XML Parser

by in CodeSOD on

Since we were discussing XML earlier this week, it's a good time to take a peek at this submission from Mark.

Before we get into it, though, we need to talk briefly about some different XML parsing philosophies. XML documents are frequently large and deeply nested trees, and once loaded into memory, consume a lot of it. So there are two methods we might use to parse XML. We might parse and load the entire DOM- having all of that expensive processing and memory usage. The advantage is that we have the whole structure in memory, and can quickly and efficiently navigate through it. The other option is to read it as a stream, and process it one node at a time. This is both faster and a lot gentler on memory, but it means you have forward-only access to the contents.

12 comments - Last comment @ 04:07

Counting on Switching

by in CodeSOD on

Frequent contributor Argle found some code written at his current company a "long time ago", but unfortunately in a galaxy far too close to our own.

If rsRecordSetD1T3("ItemState")<>"N" then
    Select Case rsRecordSetD1T3("ItemState")
    Case "R", "L"
        tally=tally+1	
    Case "B"
        tally=tally+2
    Case "N"
        tally=tally+0
    Case Else
        tally=tally+0
    End Select
    …
End If
24 comments - Last comment @ 01:48

A Bit of a Misunderstanding

by in CodeSOD on

Mark B sends us another sample from a big-ball-o-wtf.

Let's take a look at two variables. One variable is named taskDetail. The other variable is named binaryTaskDetail. You might ask yourself: what are the differences between these two?

19 comments - Last comment @ 10:48

Shipping a Gallon of Soap

by in CodeSOD on

While JSON's strength is its (relative) simplicity, XML's strength was always its power. Combined with an XML schema, you can create strongly typed documents with arbitrary data-types. For example, it's easy to define, oh, I don't know, a date time field in a way that isn't stringly typed.

Of course, that's what also creates its complexity. XML is big, and bloated, and expensive to parse. Which brings us back to the old days of SOAP- the Simple Object Access Protocol, essentially an XML remote procedure call. It was powerful, but complex, with lots of interlocking standards. With its Web Service Description Language (WSDL), the service could even be self documenting, laying out all the objects and fields you could interact with.

16 comments - Last comment @ 08:20

Common Variables

by in CodeSOD on

It's important to be prepared- but not too prepared. A common trap developers fall into is "premature abstraction"- trying to solve the general case of a problem when you only need to solve a very specific case.

Frequent contributor Argle sends us some very old BASIC code. The task was to convert this ancient language into C#.

25 comments - Last comment @ 07:09
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