I wrote a blog entry a few days ago (see the blog entry just before this one) talking about how easy it is to make a big mistake in programming, and how one little character can screw everything up. I was talking about Microsoft’s latest patch to Internet Explorer because, as it turned out, they had added a single extra ‘&’ symbol on one line of code, and it ended up being a security vulnerability.
Well, guess what happened to me today?
I deal with some of the programming aspects of a search engine at work. There exists a search box, attached to a piece of code that generates a URL and sends data to the user. We noticed that when a person searched from one area of the program it worked fine, but from another, the results were empty. This was a bit of a WTF moment.
Looking at the URL’s just a little while ago, I discovered the problem. I wanted to scream. Here are the URL’s, I’ve shortened them down from their insanely long length, down to these short lines below, just so you can see the insanity I’m dealing with.
The Non-working URL:
&site=PROD_oregon_IMT|PROD_TRG_IMT&output=xml_no_dtd
The working URL:
&site=PROD_Oregon_IMT|PROD_TRG_IMT&output=xml_no_dtd
I’ve highlighted the problem. The ‘o’ wasn’t capitalized. A single letter wasn’t capitalized. Kill me now. This took three people the better part of almost four hours today to fix, and in the end, it was a god damned ‘o’.