Back in the ’00s I worked on a codebase that was maintained by one programmer. He did everything himself, and learned from no one. I see this collection of coding horrors as a testament to the dangers of working in a monoculture.

This list is captured from an archive of the original. Thanks, Wayback Machine!

I’ve been doing some work on a not-very-clean codebase. It’s in PHP, but it’s not PHP’s fault that it’s bad. Here are some of the gems from it:

$spaces="                            ";

I wonder how many there are there. Who wants to count?

Apparently there was a problem with unescaped ampersands, so here’s the fix:

if ($category == "R&D (Research & Development")
    $category = "R&D (Research & Development";

That’s it. One instance of escaping the &. No generalized solution for the next time a variable has an ampersand in it.

Don’t you hate it when you get a message like “You have 1 item(s) in your cart”? Me, too, but this isn’t the way around it.

if ($n > 1)
    echo "   * - These items will incur a Special Cost of $5.95 (1 item), $8.95 (2 items), or $10.95 (3 or more items) per item<p>";
else
    echo "   * - This item will incur a Special Cost of $5.95 (1 item), $8.95 (2 items), or $10.95 (3 or more items) per item<p>";

Mattoon is a city in downstate Illinois, and one of our customers is there. Never mind that each special customer gets their own variable flag, like $mattoon, $poughkeepsie, etc. Never mind that $mattoon is a global. They’re just always out of luck here:

$mattoon=0;
if(strtolower($state)=="il" && strtolower(substr($cust_name,0,7)) == "mattoon")
{
    $mattoon=1;
}
$mattoon=0;

I’ve written before that the world’s worst variable name is $data and $data2, but intentional misspellings to differentiate variables might be up there:

$agencee=$agency;
if ($agencee == "")
    $agencee = $agencyid;

Truncate the string first, then strcat to the end of it.

UserList[0]='\0';
strcat(UserList, userinfo);

Most of us call that strcpy.

About the only thing worse than intentionally misspelling identifiers to differentiate between similar ones is differentiating by an embedded underline:

sort infile.txt -oin_file.txt +1 -10

Apparently there was some concern that the string might lengthen in midloop in this chunk of C code?

for (z=0;z<strlen(xtitle);z++)
    xtitle[z]=toupper(xtitle[z]);

I guess that C’s built-in memset() didn’t fit the bill:

memcpy(ptr,"\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0\0",10);

To add a salesperson to the system, you have to create records in two auxiliary tables. I asked the programmer what had to be done to get this to happen, or if there was a script to do it. His reply:

This is not automated. The SQL commands would be different for each sales rep unless they happened to have the same name and territory.

I asked the programmer about how an update process runs:

Why are the update programs run as root? Was there a permissions problem that you had to get around?

His answer:

When running with root permissions, there are no permission problems. That is why it is run that way.

Jeff Goff notes in IRC: “No permission problems and all permission problems at the same time. It’s kind of like Zen.”

Liz Cortell points out that “That’s the Unix equivalent of ‘I have no drinking problem. I drink. I get drunk. I fall down. No problem’”

The HTML is atrocious, of course. Lots of unnecessary tables.

Best of all, he omits tags that aren’t strictly necessary to browser rendering, such as </td> tags in tables, and </font> tags inside those cells.

Here’s some creative indentation. Read carefully!

if ( $condition ) ; else {
    do_something();
}

If you need to add commas to a long number, and it’s never occurred to you to use the built-in PHP function number_format, go ahead and write your own. No need for a generic algorithm, though!

function comedit($fld) {
    $fld=(float)$fld;    $vao=sprintf("%d",$fld);
    $sl=strlen($vao);
    if ($sl == 9)
        $vao=substr($vao,0,3) . "," . substr($vao,3,3) . "," . substr($vao,6);
    elseif ($sl == 8)        $vao=substr($vao,0,2) . "," . substr($vao,2,3) . "," . substr($vao,5);
    elseif ($sl == 7)
        $vao=substr($vao,0,1) . "," . substr($vao,1,3) . "," . substr($vao,4);
    elseif ($sl == 6)
        $vao=substr($vao,0,3) . "," . substr($vao,3);
    elseif ($sl == 5)        $vao=substr($vao,0,2) . "," . substr($vao,2);
    elseif ($sl == 4)
        $vao=substr($vao,0,1) . "," . substr($vao,1);
    return($vao);
}

So many choices about how to set the background color!

if ($bgct == 2) {
    $bgct=0;
    $bgcolor="#D7D7D7";
}
else
    $bgcolor="#FFFFFF";
$bgcolor="#FFFFFF";
$bgcolor="#FCF5E4";

For God’s sake, don’t use any more variables than absolutely necessary!

if ($uselc > 'A')
    printf("<input TYPE=\"radio\" onclick=\"arrows2(%d);document.simsearch.searchwords.focus()\" NAME=\"sorder\" value=\"4\" $schk4> </td>\n<td><font face=\"arial\" size=\"-1\">LC Call, Author, Title</td>",$imageval+8+$imageadd);
else
    printf("<input TYPE=\"radio\" onclick=\"arrows2(%d);document.simsearch.searchwords.focus()\" NAME=\"sorder\" value=\"4\" $schk4> </td>\n<td><font face=\"arial\" size=\"-1\">Dewey, Author, Title</td>",$imageval+8+$imageadd);

This determination of odd numbers, it is too baffling!

for ($x=1;$x<13;$x++) {
    if (($x == 1) || ($x == 3) || ($x == 5) || ($x == 7) || ($x == 9) || ($x == 11)) {
        ....
}

Here’s another way of distinguishing similar variables: Capitalize them!

if ($pages > 0)
    $Pages=", $pages" . "p";
else
    $Pages="";

This just sort of sums it up:

if ( $month < 1 || $month > 12 ) {
    die( "Month must be between 1 and 12\n" );
}
--$month; // Just because that's the way it's always been

A logical OR operator|| would make this simpler.

if ($pubmonth == "")
    $pubmonth = 0;
if ($pubmonth == 0)
    $pubmonth = 1;

Who needs arrays?

$s0=$s1=$s2=$s3=$s4=$s5=$s6=$s7=$s8=$s9=$s10=$s11=$s12=$s13=$s14=$s15=$s16=$s17=$s18=$s19=$s20=$s21=$s22=$s23=$s24="";

Optimizing cut & pasted code to remove the variable that will always be 10 is a good start, but why only go halfway there?

<textarea name="text1" readonly style="overflow: hidden"  rows="<?php print 10 ?>" cols="34" wrap="soft">

One of the biggest problems programmers seem to have is expecting that others know what they’re thinking.

$dformat='l';         // changed on 9-6-01

Changed how? What was $dformat before? WHY was it changed?

C programming can be so difficult; for example, to open a file with a constant name:

char    BookName[50],Review[50];
/* later */
sprintf(Review,"/web/flr.data/fixedbook.idx");
if((Rev=fopen(Review,"a")) == NULL) {
/* ... */

If only there was a way to say, “do this, else do that”…

<?
if ($subuser != 'Y') : ?><a href="...">...</a><?
endif;
if ($subuser == 'Y') : ?><img
src="..."><?
endif;
?>

Bonus: PHP’s awful if (condition) : statements; endif; syntax!

Make sure that this 100-hyphen line is left-justified in a 100-column space!

printf("%-100s\n",str_repeat("-",100));

Just to be extra sure…

if ($totqty == 0)
$totqty=0;
if ($totprice == 0)
$totprice = 0;
if ($totdisc == 0)
$totdisc = 0;

What’s our record number?

rn=1;
rn = (rn - 1) * rl + lh;

Never mind the reuse of rn as a variable name, that reduces to:

rn = lh;

I guess he didn’t know that sprintf can handle more than one variable.

$xxx=sprintf("%02d",$gridrows);
$yyy=sprintf("%02d",$gridcols);
$gridrepeat=$xxx . $yyy;

If you’ve had problems with memory overruns, the answer is to solve the problem, not throw in arbitrarily huge memory buffers that are actually buffers against slop.

char crazeee1 [100000];
PGresult *lres;
char crazee1 [100000];
PGresult *res2;
char crazee [100000];
PGresult *resthree;
char crazee2 [100000];
PGresult *res4;

When erasing disk drives, you want to write out one pattern on the drive, then write a different pattern over that. But you don’t have to do that with variables.

$isbns="";
$isbns=array();

I’ve never liked the removal of vowels as a method to shorten variables, such as the common exercise here of the results of a query being called $rslt. But what if you need another one? You call it $rlst!

Pete Krawczyk, coworker at the time, counted all the variations in the codebase:

   4 $r1lt
   4 $r2lt
  18 $r9lt
   3 $ralt
  94 $rblt
  33 $rclt
  29 $rdlt
   6 $rest
 161 $revt
  50 $rflt
 608 $rglt
  36 $rhlt
  20 $rilt
  46 $rjlt
 188 $rklt
   4 $rllt
   7 $rlst
  53 $rplt
 507 $rqlt
  66 $rrlt
7345 $rslt
  94 $rtlt
  32 $rult
 169 $rvlt
 114 $rwlt
1962 $rxlt
   4 $rylt
 744 $rzlt