CodeSOD: I See What Happened

Graham picked up a ticket regarding their password system. It seemed that several users had tried to put in a perfectly valid password, according to the rules, but it was rejected.

Graham's first step was to attempt to replicate on his own, but couldn't do it. So he followed up with one of the end users, and got them to reveal the password they had tried to use. That allowed him to trigger the bug, so he dug into the debugger to find the root cause.

private static final String UPPERCASE_LETTERS = "ABDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ";private int countMatches(String string, String charList) { int count = 0; for (char c : charList.toCharArray()) { count += StringUtils.countMatches(string, String.valueOf(c)); } return count;}

This isn't a great solution, but it at least works. Well, it "works" if you are able to remember how to recite the alphabet. If you look closely, you can tell that there are no pirate on their development team, because while pirates are fond of the letter "R", their first love will always be the "C".