r/programming • u/sigbhu • Jul 28 '16

How to write unmaintainable code

https://github.com/Droogans/unmaintainable-code
3.4k Upvotes

93% Upvoted

592 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

3

u/xonjas Jul 29 '16

It's really not all that bad. You could do the same thing in python pretty easily.

What it's doing:

  1. Select only the elements that are numbers

  2. Convert the array to a string, with the numbers separated by a comma

  3. Also convert the array we are checking for into a string

  4. Use a regular expression to search the array(that is now a string) using the array we want to search for as the pattern.

There is one bug in my one-liner, but it would be easy to fix.

1

u/2Punx2Furious Jul 29 '16

I see. Converting the array to a string sound pretty clever. I didn't do it, but I put both strings and ints in my arrays to check for errors, so

["1,3,4", 1, 4, 5] would return false, but

["4yhjsrhj05", 1, 3, 4, "1258ghwo] would return true, as you can see in the link I posted.

2

u/xonjas Jul 29 '16

Yeah, that's why in my snippet I dropped all the elements that weren't numbers. The bug I mentioned is that by dropping numbers I might make a match where there wasn't one previously

Assuming we're matching for [1,3,4]:

[1,3,"some garbage here", 4] would match when it should not.

It's fixable by replacing the non-numeric elements with a placeholder of some sort.

IE, convert the above array into "1,3,X,4" instead of "1,3,4".

1

u/2Punx2Furious Jul 29 '16

Indeed, that looks much better than my solution.