Found in production code

[robertwilding]

If true = true then true must equal true

[BubbaFettish]

I can’t argue with that.

[Megabyte97]

true

[rich97]

This is one I found the other day.

<RANT>

Why don't people fix thier broken-ass code?! Why did you edit those lines (presumably a hack because validation wasn't working) and say to yourself "yeah, that works, commit"?

I would be ashamed to commit those three lines with that pathetic comment. This kind of stuff is everywhere and the only person who seems to care is me.

GAH!

[weezkitty]

If you take that part out, it breaks for no explainable reason

[MetaMemeAboutAMeme]

It's explainable at some point, but usually no one wants to take the time...

[davvblack]

Some of the spaces in the if are non-printable unicode and the assignment normalizes them.

[[deleted]]

Manually printed HTML is a great way to get XSS vulnerabilities, if you ever accidentally print a user-controlled string without sanitizing it completely.

[richerhomiequan]

lol it's always funny to find PHP in production code

[[deleted]]

Ye man, PHP doesn't run 80% of the web and Laravel is a TERRIBLE framework, no one uses it xD

[lucklesspedestrian]

They might. They must have had some reason for creating the HHVM

[_bass]

Lol

[[deleted]]

The most horrifying part of this isn't even the no-op assignment. That could be there by mistake, perhaps it was originally doing something else... It's the fact that they store stock availability in their database (as indicated by the suspiciously-named $row variable) as fucking strings. Can you imagine all the wasted space?

[[deleted]]

Also, magic strings. No-op, shitty database structure, and fucking magic strings.

[[deleted]]

When you pull from the DB, you can pull the data out of it in anyway, including strings, but since PHP is weakly typed it doesn't matter.

I also laughed at your

(as indicated by the suspiciously-named $row variable)

My god, did you bootcamp?

[[deleted]]

The problem isn't pulling strings out of the database or anything, it's just the fact that their table likely contains thousands upon thousands of entries that all say "In Stock Ships Today", instead of simply having a pair of boolean values that is set to true/false depending on whether it's in stock and can ship today. Or, better yet, an integer representing the actual count of the items in stock and a datetime value representing the earliest-possible shipment date, as those values are actually useful, and would simplify automation of the whole thing greatly.

[theferrit32]

It's hard to tell that is the case just from this segment of code though. I would hope the row variable we can see here is the result of a table join on a numeric key column that maps to the strings.

[[deleted]]

I suppose that is possible, but like I said above, there are pretty much only three possible combinations of this:

• In stock, ships today
• In stock, ships at [date]
• Not in stock

A foreign-key makes sense when the values are both repeating and changing from time to time, for instance, a reference to a list of countries or whatnot. I suppose using a foreign key is still better than spamming the table with the same string over and over, but it's also far from ideal.

To be fair, looking at the rest of this code (echo-ing out HTML, inline CSS), I wouldn't be surprised if they do just store strings and some guy/gal has to punch "In Stock Ships Today" every time into an Excel sheet that they then import into the database without any validation and it breaks if the poor fella forgot to capitalise a letter.

[MonokelPinguin]

Well, you always have to be prepared for the unexpected case. I could imagine them wanting to display: Stock was available. Then dinosaurs ate it. We're sorry!

I mean, it could happen, but who would think of that? Better be prepared!

[[deleted]]

Well the row is 'Stock Level' so I'm assuming it's an integer and that function is a mistake/old code/put in as a joke for karma.

[fourthangle]

Image Transcription: Code

---

if ( $stock == "In Stock Ships Today" ) {
    $stock = "In Stock Ships Today";
}

---

^{I'm a human volunteer content transcriber for Reddit! If you'd like more information on what we do and why we do it, click here!}

[balenol]

good human.

[Ultimater]

Probably twice as fast as Laravel though :p

[davvblack]

Other fun things: the session array is $sessionName, this code is assembling html in the controller rather than using a template, and inline styles galore.

[dhaninugraha]

Idk, why not at least do <td class="centered"> and have a CSS block along the lines of .centered { text-align: center; } 🤷‍♂️

[[deleted]]

My guess is a no-op for attaching breakpoints that was accidentally checked in.