At the end of the lecture session, students immediately started packing up their laptops to race across campus for their next class. Andrews professor droned on, anyway, describing their assignment. Ive provided parser code, he said, so you can just download the datafile and use it.

He had more to say, but no one was paying attention. Perhaps he even had a correction to the assignment- because when Andrew went to download the data file for the assignment 404ed.

Andrew emailed the professor, but figured- Hey, I can get started. Ill just read the parser code to understand the file format.

String line = br.readLine();
for (int i=0; icode>

The parsing code itself was an overly complicated reinvention of String.split with absolutely no error handling. That was enough to make Andrew cringe, but its hardly the worst code you could have. No, the real bad code was the code that read from the file.

You might be thinking to yourself, Well, Java does make file I/O a bit complicated, but you just link a FileInputStream with a BufferedReader, or even save yourself all that trouble and use the very convenient FileReader.

Now, I dont want to put words in this professors mouth, but I think they would point out that a FileReader reinvents a wheel thats already on your OS. Why go through all this trouble to open a file and read from it if you already have a program on your OS that can open and read files?

List command = new ArrayList();
command.add("cat");
command.add(filename);
ProcessBuilder builder = new ProcessBuilder(command);
builder.redirectErrorStream(true);
final Process process = builder.start();
InputStream is = process.getInputStream();
InputStreamReader isr = new InputStreamReader(is);
BufferedReader br = new BufferedReader(isr);
// discard the first line
String line = br.readLine();
for (int i=0; icode>

Why not open the cat command? I mean, sure, now youre tied to a system with cat installed, losing the cross-platform benefits of Java. I hope none of these students are using Windows. Then theres the overhead of launching a new process. Also, process.waitFor is a blocking call that doesnt terminate until the called program terminates, which means a bad input can hang the application.

Its worth noting that this code wasnt merely written for this assignment, either. In fact, this code started life as part of a research project conducted by multiple members of the CS departments faculty. Using this parser was not an optional part of the project, either- use of this code was required.

http://thedailywtf.com/articles/grumpy-cat