Today's a simple one. We've all seen code that relies too heavily on string concatenation and eschews useful methods like Join.

Nick L sends us this VB.Net example, written by a slew of mechanical engineers.

Juliano had this very non-WTF bit of PHP code:

if (!$path) {
	//do stuff
} else {
	//do other stuff
}

Gavin continues work on the old C++ app he inherited. Today we get a delightful smattering of bad choices.

HRESULT CExAPI::GetPageCacheForFolder( IN  CEntryID *p_cio_Folder, OUT CPageCache **pp_PC )
{
	CEntryID *p_cio_Local = new CEntryID( this, p_cio_Folder );

	switch ( p_cio_Folder->m_uiType )
	{
		case EID_TYPE_EMPTY:
			return S_OK;
			break;
		case EID_TYPE_NORMAL :
			return GetPageCacheForNormalFolder(p_cio_Folder, pp_PC );
			break;
		case EID_TYPE_ADDRESSBOOK :
			return GetPageCacheForABFolder(p_cio_Folder, 0, pp_PC );
			break;
	}

	return S_OK;

	DeleteIfNotNULL( p_cio_Local );
}

"The attached class connects to an Access database," writes Nicolai. That's always a good start for a WTF. Let's take a look.

public class ResultLoader {

	private static Logger sysLog = Logger.getLogger(ResultLoader.class);
	private static String url = "somePath";

	/**
	 * get the ResultTable from the Access database
	 * 
	 * @param tableName
	 * @return
	 */
	private static Table getResultTable(String tableName) {
		try {
			// create a new file with the path to the table
			File db = new File(url);
			// let Jackcess open the file and return a table
			return Database.open(db).getTable(tableName);
		} catch (IOException e) {
			e.printStackTrace();
		}
		return null;
	}

	/**
	 * load result from DB
	 */
	public static void loadResult() {
		String tableName = "Result";
		Table resultTable = getResultTable(tableName);

		if (!resultTable.equals(null)) {
			Map<Integer, Float> yearConsumption = new HashMap<Integer, Float>();

			for (Map<String, Object> row : resultTable) {
				/*
				 *  [snip] does something with the table's rows
				 */
			}
			Result result = new Result(00, new Date(), consumptions);
		} else {
			sysLog.info("There is no data object in the Access Database!");
		}
	}
}

While Java didn't invent putting a toString method in the base class of every object, it certainly made it mainstream. The nice thing about the method is that it allows you to turn any object into a string, though it's up to the implementor to decide what a good string representation is. But what if you want to ensure that the object you're handed is really and truly a string, not just something you can convert to a string?

teknopaul's co-worker found their own solution:

While poring through some VB .Net code, John noticed some odd things in their datamodel. For example, a different process would scan files, and log any "suspicious" files into a database. The program John supported would then report on that data.

One of their classes had a property which looked like this: