Amity sends us a "weird" replacement, and I regret to inform you, it's not as weird as it should be. $body = str_replace(['<pre><code>', '</code></pre>'], ['<pre>', '</pre>'], $body); This PHP code scans through a string containing HTML and replaces all the <pre><code>.../<code></pre> tags with just...

A few holiday seasons ago, Paul S was doing the requisite holiday shopping online, looking for those perfectly impersonal but mildly thoughtful gifts that many companies specialize in. This was one of the larger such vendors, well known for its fruit-filled gift baskets. As is not uncommon for our r...

Today, it's not exactly the code that was bad. For some time, a government agency had been collecting information from users using fillable PDF forms. The user would submit the form, and then a data entry clerk would copy the text from the form into a database. This, of course, raised the question: ...

It is eminitently reasonable for companies to have "readability standards" for their code. You're writing this code for humans to read, after all, at least in theory. You need to communicate to future inheritors of your code. But that doesn't mean readability standards are good. Tony's company, for ...

In only a handful of years, four Liverpudlian scruffs clawed their way from obscurity to unprecedented worldwide celebrity. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Already making a mint from "Money" and other hits, by 1965 they were MBEs, and suddenly discovered class solidarity -- with the rest of the singlet-clad bathe...

Read (Part One here) When Ellis awoke on Sunday, the unusual cold broke through her drowsiness right away. Her new thermostat was programmed to maintain a lower temperature overnight, but at 6:30AM, it was supposed to climb again, kicking the heat on right when she got out of bed. Why was it so cold...

Today's anonymous submitter passes us a single line of JavaScript, and it's a doozy. This line works, but that's through no fault of the developer behind it. {arr?.length && shouldNotShow === false > 0 (...)} Pedantically, this is JSX, not pure JavaScript, but the rules still apply. So, fun fact in ...

Capybara James sends us some code which is totally designed to be modular. This particular software accepts many kinds of requests which it then converts into a request for a ListView. This is a perfect example of where to use polymorphism, so you can write one transform method that operates on any ...

Dana sends us a WTF that'll turn your head. She was shopping for new hard drives, and was doing it from her phone, a fairly reasonable tool to use for online shopping these days. She opened the website of one vendor, and it was rotated 90 degrees. Or half-pi radians, for those of us that are more us...

Here's a weird email but IMO the erorr is just the odd strikethrough. Bill T. explains: "From my Comcast email spam folder. It was smart enough to detect it was spam, but... spam from a trusted sender? And either the delivery truck is an emoji (possible), an embedded image (maybe?), or Comcast is no...

Today's Anonymous submitter sends us some React code. We'll look at the code and then talk about the WTF: // inside a function for updating checkboxes on a page if (!e.target.checked) { const removeIndex = await checkedlist.findIndex( (sel) => sel.Id == selected.Id, ) const removeRowIndex = await Ro...

Aankhen has a peer who loves writing Python scripts to automate repetitive tasks. We'll call this person Ernest. Ernest was pretty proud of some helpers he wrote to help him manage his Docker containers. For example, when he wanted to stop and remove all his running Docker containers, he wrote this ...

Every once in awhile, we get a bit of terrible code, and our submitter also shares, "this isn't called anywhere," which is good, but also bad. Ernesto sends us a function which is called in only one place: /// /// Shutdown server /// private void shutdownServer() { shutdownServer(); } The "one place...

Our anonymous submitter relates a tale of simplification gone bad. As this nightmare unfolds, imagine the scenario of a new developer coming aboard at this company. Imagine being the one who has to explain this setup to said newcomer. Imagine being the newcomer who inherits it. David's job should ha...

First up with the money quote, Peter G. remarks "Hi first_name euro euro euro, look how professional our marketing services are! "   "It takes real talent to mispell error" jokes Mike S. They must have done it on purpose.   I long wondered where the TikTok profits came from, and now I know. It's Dan...

We mostly don't pick on bad SQL queries here, because mostly the query optimizer is going to fix whatever is wrong, and the sad reality is that databases are hard to change once they're running; especially legacy databases. But sometimes the code is just so hamster-bowling-backwards that it's worth ...

Today's snippet from Rich D is short and sweet, and admittedly, not the most TFs of WTFs out there. But it made me chuckle, and sometimes that's all we need. This Java snippet shows us how to delete a file: if (Files.exists(filePath)) { Files.deleteIfExists(filePath); } If the file exists, then if i...

Agatha has inherited some Windows Forms code. This particular batch of such code falls into that delightful category of code that's wrong in multiple ways, multiple times. The task here is to disable a few panels worth of controls, based on a condition. Or, since this is in Spanish, "bloquear contro...

Python is (in)famous for its "batteries included" approach to a standard library, but it's not that notable that it has plenty of standard data structures, like dicts. Nor is in surprising that dicts have all sorts of useful methods, like pop, which removes a key from the dict and returns its value....

Pike pike pike pike Pike pike pike. Lincoln KC repeated "I never knew Bank of America Bank of America Bank of America was among the major partners of Bank of America."   "Extra tokens, or just a stutter?" asks Joel "An errant alt-tab caused a needless google search, but thankfully Gemini's AI summar...

Industrial machines are generally accompanied by "Human Machine Interfaces", HMIs. This is industrial slang for a little computerized box you use to control the industrial machine. All the key logic and core functionality and especially the safety functionality is handled at a deeper computer layer ...

I've had the misfortune of working in places which did source-control via comments. Like one place which required that, with each section of code changed, you needed to add a comment with your name, the ticket number, and the reason the change was made. You know, the kind of thing you can just get f...

Henrik H's employer thought they could save money by hiring offshore, and save even more money by hiring offshore junior developers, and save even more money by basically not supervising them at all. Henrik sends us just one representative line: if (System.DateTime.Now.AddDays(-365) <= f.ReleaseDate...

The utility closet Ellis had inherited and lived with for 17 years had been a cesspool of hazards to life and limb, a collection of tangible WTFs that had everyone asking an uncaring god, "What were they thinking?" Every contractor who'd ever had to perform any amount of work in there had come away ...