Since it's election day in the US, many people are thinking about counting today. We frequently discuss counting here, and how to do it wrong, so let's look at some code from RK.

This code may not be counting votes, but whatever it's counting, we're not going to enjoy it:

case LogMode.Row_limit: // row limit excel = 65536 rows
    if (File.Exists(personalFolder + @"" + fileName + ".CSV"))
    {
        using (StreamReader reader = new StreamReader(personalFolder + @"" + fileName + ".CSV"))
        {
            countRows = reader.ReadToEnd().Split(new char[] { '
' }).Length;
        }
    }

Now, this code is from a rather old application, originally released in 2007. So the comment about Excel's row limit really puts us in a moment in time- Excel 2007 raised the row limit to 1,000,000 rows. But older versions of Excel did cap out at 65,536. And it wasn't the case that everyone just up and switched to Excel 2007 when it came out- transitioning to the new Office file formats was a conversion which took years.

But we're not even reading an Excel file, we're reading a CSV.

I enjoy that we construct the name twice, because that's useful. But the real magic of this one is how we count the rows. Because while Excel can handle 65,536 rows at this time, I don't think this program is going to do a great job of it- because we read the entire file into memory with ReadToEnd, then Split on newlines, then count the length that way.

As you can imagine, in practice, this performed terribly on large files, of which there were many.

Unfortunately for RK, there's one rule about old, legacy code: don't touch it. So despite fixing this being a rather easy task, nobody is working on fixing it, because nobody wants to be the one who touched it last. Instead, management is promising to launch a greenfield replacement project any day now…

There's the potential for endless installments of "programmers not understanding how UUIDs work." Frankly, I think the fact that we represent them as human readable strings is part of the problem; sure, it's readable, but conceals the fact that it's just a large integer.

Which brings us to this snippet, from Capybara James.

    if (!StringUtils.hasLength(uuid) || uuid.length() != 36) {
        throw new RequestParameterNotFoundException(ErrorCodeCostants.UUID_MANDATORY_OR_FORMAT);
    }

StringUtils.hasLength comes from the Spring library, and it's a simple "is not null or empty" check. So- we're testing to see if a string is null or empty, or isn't exactly 36 characters long. That tells us the input is bad, so we throw a RequestParameterNotFoundException, along with an error code.

So, as already pointed out, a UUID is just a large integer that we render as a 36 character string, and there are better ways to validate a UUID. But this also will accept any 36 character string- as long as you've got 36 characters, we'll call it a UUID. "This is valid, really valid, dumbass" is now a valid UUID.

With that in mind, I also like the bonus of it not distinguishing between whether or not the input was missing or invalid, because that'll make it real easy for users to understand why their input is getting rejected.

Ross needed to write software to integrate with a credit card payment gateway. The one his company chose was relatively small, and only served a handful of countries- but it covered the markets they cared about and the transaction fees were cheap. They used XML for data interchange, and while they had no published schema document, they did have some handy-dandy sample code which let you parse their XML messages.

$response = curl_exec($ch);
$authecode = fetch_data($response, '<authCode>', '</authCode>');
$responsecode = fetch_data($response, '<responsecode>', '</responsecode>');
$retrunamount = fetch_data($response, '<returnamount>', '</returnamount>');
$trxnnumber = fetch_data($response, '<trxnnumber>', '</trxnnumber>');
$trxnstatus = fetch_data($response, '<trxnstatus>', '</trxnstatus>');
$trxnresponsemessage = fetch_data($response, '<trxnresponsemessage>', '</trxnresponsemessage>');

Well, this looks… worrying. At first glance, I wonder if we're going to have to kneel before Z̸̭͖͔͂̀ā̸̡͖͕͊l̴̜͕͋͌̕g̸͉̳͂͊ȯ̷͙͂̐. What exactly does fetch_data actually do?

function fetch_data($string, $start_tag, $end_tag)
{

  $position = stripos($string, $start_tag);
  $str = substr($string, $position);
  $str_second = substr($str, strlen($start_tag));
  $second_positon = stripos($str_second, $end_tag);
  $str_third = substr($str_second, 0, $second_positon);
  $fetch_data = trim($str_third);
  return $fetch_data;
}

Phew, no regular expressions, just… lots of substrings. This parses the XML document with no sense of the document's structure- it literally just searches for specific tags, grabs whatever is between them, and calls it done. Nested tags? Attributes? Self-closing tags? Forget about it. Since it doesn't enforce that your open and closing tags match, it also lets you grab arbitrary (and invalid) document fragments- fetch_data($response, "<fooTag>", "<barTag>"), for example.

And it's not like this needs to be implemented from scratch- PHP has built-in XML parsing classes. We could argue that by limiting ourselves to a subset of XML (which I can only hope this document does) and doing basic string parsing, we've built a much simpler approach, but I suspect that after doing a big pile of linear searches through the document, we're not really going to see any performance benefits from this version- and maintenance is going to be a nightmare, as it's so fragile and won't work for many very valid XML documents.

It's always amazing when TRWTF is neither PHP nor XML but… whatever this is.

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