CodeSOD: Objectifying Yourself

“Boy, stringly typed data is hard to work with. I wish there were some easier way to work with it!”

This, presumably, is what Gary‘s predecessor said. Followed by, “Wait, I have an idea!”

<span class="hljs-keyword">public</span> <span class="hljs-keyword">static</span> Object <span class="hljs-title function_">createValue</span><span class="hljs-params">(String string)</span> {
	<span class="hljs-type">Object</span> <span class="hljs-variable">value</span> <span class="hljs-operator">=</span> parseBoolean(string);
	<span class="hljs-keyword">if</span> (value != <span class="hljs-literal">null</span>) {
		<span class="hljs-keyword">return</span> value;
	}

	value = parseInteger(string);
	<span class="hljs-keyword">if</span> (value != <span class="hljs-literal">null</span>) {
		<span class="hljs-keyword">return</span> value;
	}

	value = parseDouble(string);
	<span class="hljs-keyword">if</span> (value != <span class="hljs-literal">null</span>) {
		<span class="hljs-keyword">return</span> value;
	}

	<span class="hljs-keyword">return</span> string;
}

This takes a string, and then tries to parse it, first into a boolean, failing that into an integer, and failing that into a double. Otherwise, it returns the original string.

And it returns an object, which means you still get to guess what’s in there even after this. You just get to guess what it returned, and hope you cast it to the correct type. Which means this almost certainly is called like this:

<span class="hljs-type">boolean</span> <span class="hljs-variable">myBoolField</span> <span class="hljs-operator">=</span> (Boolean)createValue(someStringContainingABool);

Which makes the whole thing useless, which is fun.

Gary found this code in a “long since abandoned” project, and I can’t imagine why it ended up getting abandoned.

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