Why not start with a "How Stupid..."?

I have been working in both VFP and .NET lately, and recently had a "blonde" moment due to the fact that in VFP, everything is 1-based, whereas in .NET, everything is 0-based.

In VFP, if you want to search for a string within a string, VFP has a function called AT(), which returns the starting point of the string within the string. If the string cannot be found, AT() returns 0.

I wanted to create the .NET equivalent of the following VFP code:

   lcEmailMessageBody = "<html> ...."

   IF AT("<html",lcEmailMessageBody)>0 THEN
      SendHTMLMail(lcEmailMessageBody)
   ELSE
      SendTextMail(lcEmailMessageBody)
   ENDIF


So I create the following .NET equivalent:

   lcEmailMessageBody = "<html>....";

   if(lcEmailMessageBody.IndexOf("<html")>0)
      SendHTMLMail(lcEmailMessageBody);
   else
      SendTextMail(lcEmailMessageBody);


Pretty straightforward, n'est-ce pas?

AAANNNN - wrong! When I ran this code, it only sent text mail.

***HEADSLAP***

Since strings in .NET are 0-based, a return value of 0 from IndexOf() means that the string was found in the first character of the string (character position 0 in the string). A return value of-1 means that the string is not found. so the proper if-statement is:

   if(lcEmailMessageBody.IndexOf("<html")!=-1)

The funny part is that before I got slapped, I created another project to test it there, andthen asked a colleague if he got the same result on his computer. And as the words came out of my mouth, I realized the mistake, and braced myself for the slap.

Comments

Rick Hodder said…
Thanks for the kind words requiscat! Your no slouch yourself - your blog shows that you're well read, and your tastes in music are very eclectic.
5:16 PM
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