The Daily WTF

Today’s submission comes from Florian, and it starts with “this app processes important business transaction by email”, which is always a good way to start a WTF. I’ve seen a depressing number of applications in my life that use email as a means of data exchange. It’s common enough that even the industry standard EDI protocol supports email as one of its transports, but hoo boy is that a terrible abuse of email systems.

Let’s start in HtmlResponseParser.cs, which reads in HTML and “parses” it for certain structures so it can extract data.

public static Response createFromAscii(string r) { string regEx = “^” + RegExpMgr.getRegularExpression(“requestRefNum”) + RegExpMgr.getRegularExpression(“spaceTabSeparator”) + RegExpMgr.getRegularExpression(“bbTickerAndName”) // snip: 10 more lines + “).*?”; Match m = Regex.Match(r, regEx); if(m.Success) { // Let caller handle exceptions bool status = true; int id = parseID(m.Groups[1].Value); int type = parseType(m.Groups[1].Value); string ticker = m.Groups[2].Value; double quantity = parseQuantity(m.Groups[3].Value); DateTime

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