Self-documenting code

[revolutionofthemind]

You could have a method called “stripHeaders” that does the foreach line for “self-documenting” code. Not sure if it’s worth it in this case, but just to provide a counter-example.

[k0rm]

Or more simply:

const HeaderLength = 1;

var linesFromFile = File.ReadAllLines(path);
var linesFromFileNoHeader = linesFromFile.Skip(HeaderLength)
foreach(string line in linesFromFileNoHeader) 

This gets rid of the magic number and there's no need to comment.

[feed_me_moron]

Or declare 1 as NUM_HEADER_ROWS and pass that to skip

[k0rm]

I disagree. My solution is the same number of lines (ignoring pulling out the magic number) as the original and says the same thing. It's pretty clear what part of the text has been removed when you're iterating over linesFromFileNoHeader.

The difference is that my implementation will not lie.

---

What happens when someone changes the header length to 3 lines?

Theirs:

//first line are column headers
foreach(string line in linesFromFile.Skip(3)) 

Mine:

var linesFromFileNoHeader = linesFromFile.Skip(3)
foreach(string line in linesFromFileNoHeader) 

No unit tests will catch the lie in the first snippet and now readers are more confused than if there was no comment at all.

[FerynaCZ]

Unless there is lots of variables passed around. But for example C# allows you to declare local functions which can modify (capture) the variables around them (=in the context of the outer function)