TrUe Romance

Mario‘s predecessor was writing some Java code that parsed textual input. Thus, it needed to be able to turn the string "true" into the boolean value true, but also needed to handle "True" and "TRUE".

Now, in Java, the obvious answer would be to use the equalsIgnoresCase String member function. if (value.equalsIgnoresCase("true"))…. I mean, obvious to you or me, anyway.

But if you’re a developer with a hammer, you’re going to turn every problem into a nail. And when that hammer is regular expressions, you’re going to turn every problem into two problems.

    public boolean isHelpReference() {
        try {
            String value = mSourceParams.get("CONTEXT_HELP"); 

Pattern p = Pattern.compile(".*[Tt][Rr][Uu][Ee].*");
Matcher m = p.matcher(value);
return m.matches();

        } catch (NullPointerException npe) {
            
        } catch (ClassCastException cce) {
            
        }

        return false;
    }

Indentation is as submitted.

Again, the goal here is to turn a string containing “true” into a boolean value, but this actually has the bonus of turning any string containing “true” as a substring into a boolean true, including “not true”. So it’s incorrect, but just so happens to work because there are no input strings like that.

I also think the ClassCastException is mysterious, and unless mSourceParams.get throws that out, I don’t think that’s a real expected exception here. And if mSourceParams.get does throw a ClassCastException, I think there’s a deeper problem.