Representative Line: An HTTP Code

Peter B's company didn't have the resource availability to develop their new PHP application entirely in-house, and thus brought in a Highly Paid Contractora to oversee that project. This story could end here, and you could fill in the rest, but Peter found an" interesting block of code during the autopsy on this disaster.

Now, I want you to imagine that someone has handed you an integer. You need to know if that integer constitutes a valid HTTP status code. Now, this could get difficult, as just because a number falls between 100 and 599 doesn't mean that it's actually a defined status code. Then again, services may define their own status codes, and clients should understand the class of a status code, even if they don't understand the number, so getting a 147 code isn't wrong, so we can just probably assume any n where 100 <= n < 600 is valid enough.

Sorry, I've gotten off track, because I really just can't believe this code is the solution someone came up with.

function isValidHttpCode($code){ return in_array(substr($code, 0, 1), [1,2,3,4,5]) && strlen($code) == 3;}

At least it's not a regular expression, but keep in mind, the $code variable was an integer in the calling code. For this code we have to coerce it to string not once, but twice. This was a Highly Paid Contractora, so I wouldn't be surprised if it was pointlessly cryptic, or overly complicated and 300 lines long, but that's not the case. I don't even think this was a case of blind copy/paste from a library of bad code used by the contracting firm, because those usually have pointless, uninformative, and confusing comments.

This is just" dumb.

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