Couple of days ago I wrote a C# function for a colleague and emailed it to him.

This is the function:

private static string EscapeCsv(string value)
{
  //Double all quote characters
  value = value.Replace("\"", "\"\"");

  //If it contains a comma or a quote char -- qualify it with quotes.
  if (value.IndexOf('"') > -1 || value.IndexOf(',') > -1)
  {
    value = "\"" + value + "\"";
  }

  return value;
}



The syntax highlighting looks very strange, because I wrote it in sql server management studio. It just happened that the only text editor i had open at the time was SQL server, so that's what i used.

(Real developers don't use any particular editor – they just use whatever's open at the time. Even the act of opening notepad is too cumbersome for the ubergeek.)

After I emailed it to my colleague I had a moment of weakness, when I suffered the tiniest smidgen of self doubt.

"Perhaps I should’ve tested the code in some way. Or -- at least -- compiled it?"

Scott Bellware and the cool alt.net kids are always banging on about this sort of stuff, so I wrote an awesome console app to test it.

namespace tests_are_for_wusses
{
  class Program
  {
    static void Main(string[] args)
    {
      System.Console.WriteLine(EscapeCsv("fred") == "fred");
      System.Console.WriteLine(EscapeCsv("fre,d") == "\"fre,d\"");
      System.Console.WriteLine(EscapeCsv("fre\"d") == "\"fre\"\"d\"");
      System.Console.ReadLine();
    }

    private static string EscapeCsv(string value)
    {
      //Double all quote characters
      value = value.Replace("\"", "\"\"");

      //If it contains a comma or a quote char -- qualify it with quotes.
      if (value.IndexOf('"') > -1 || value.IndexOf(',') > -1)
      {
        value = "\"" + value + "\"";
      }
      return value;
    }
  }
}


Naturally, the awesome code passed my awesome tests first go.

Thus I have once again shown that testing is a waste of time if you are awesome like me.

And the so-called cool kids from alt.net are just bad programmers.

Thank you.

Wait a second... I still feel I'm missing the point. Care to enlighten me?

(By the way -- pretty much every sentence in this post was sarcastic... while the story is true, my real interpretation is that i just got lucky this time. There's definitely some bugs still hidden even in a simple function like this)