CodeSOD: Never Eating the Cookie

Maciej works as a freelancer, and that frequently means picking up old PHP code that nobody wants to support.

One project had been lingering for ages with key features missing. Specifically, it was supposed to make HTTP requests to other services on an interval, and use that to populate its data. "The old dev tried, but never got it working." It was Maciej's turn to give it a shot.

$ch = curl_init( $url );curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEFILE, $cookie );curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_COOKIEJAR, $cookie );curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_COOKIE, $cookie);// ... many other options set, of course not in a function, just copy-pasted in many locations in the code ...curl_setopt( $ch, CURLOPT_TIMEOUT, $interval );$s = curl_exec( $ch );curl_close( $ch );

This particular block of code appeared multiple times in the code. Every place they meant to send an HTTP request, they copy/pasted this code in. The URL would be a different value, but the bulk of the code was just a dozen lines of copy/pasted curl_setopts.

Now, I don't know that they were dreaming that setting CURLOPT_TIMEOUT was setting a recurrence interval. But they do call the value $interval, and I can imagine the ignorant hoping to set up cURL to automatically reinvoke the request on an interval. But even if that's their goal, that's not the actual problem with this code.

They initialize a cURL wrapper, set a pile of options, and then execute the request, storing the result in $s. And do you know what they do with the contents of $s after this?

Nothing.

The request works, perhaps not on an interval, and populates the variable, and they just never use it. The old dev "tried" and never got it working? It seems like they started and got bored.

There was far worse spaghetti code to manage in the project, but it was this gap that really got Maciej's attention.

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