CodeSOD: A Loop in the String

Robert was browsing through a little JavaScript used at his organization, and found this gem of type conversion.

//use only for small numbersfunction StringToInteger (str) { var int = -1; for (var i=0; i<=100; i++) { if (i+"" == str) { int = i; break; } } return int;}

So, this takes our input str, which is presumably a string, and it starts counting from 0 to 100. i+"" coerces the integer value to a string, which we compare against our string. If it's a match, we'll store that value and break out of the loop.

Obviously, this has a glaring flaw: the 100 is hardcoded. So what we really need to do is add a search_low and search_high parameter, so we can write the for loop as i = search_low; i <= search_high; i++ instead. Because that's the only glaring flaw in this code. I can't think of any possible better way of converting strings to integers. Not a one.

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