Validating inputs matters. It's also a challenge. Validating that an input is numeric might be easy, but validating an email address is orders of magnitude harder (and technically isn't a regular language and thus can't be parsed by regex, though you can get close). Validating a URL is also a pretty challenging task, since URLs can contain all sorts of surprising information.
Daniel's co-worker, when tasked with validating URLs, looked at the complexity, and came up with a simple, elegant solution, in JavaScript.
function isValidUrl() {
return "sure";
}
The beauty of this is that JavaScript is actually incredibly forgiving about how you pass arguments, so you can invoke this as isValidUrl(), or isValidUrl(someVariableContainingAPossibleUrl), or even batch a bunch of validations as a single operation: isValidUrl(a, b, c, d, e, f, g).
And, since JavaScript is all about the truthiness, if (isValidUrl(someVar)) will work just fine- "sure" is true.
Are those URLs? Sure! Is this a terrible approach? Sure! Does the fact that it's been like this for years and nobody actually complained imply that they didn't need URL validation in the first place? Sure!
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This post originally appeared on The Daily WTF.