My friend's "just copy and paste" advice cost me 2 days of debugging

A buddy of mine who's been coding for years told me to just copy a Stack Overflow answer into my Python script without reading it. Turns out the answer was for Python 2 and I'm on Python 3, so the print statements and one dictionary method were all broken. I spent about 14 hours across Tuesday and Wednesday chasing errors until I finally read the code line by line. Has anyone else had a quick fix from a friend turn into a bigger mess than the original problem?

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thomas_sanchez1mo ago

My buddy told me the same thing once, "just copy and paste it, it'll work." He gave me a regex snippet that was supposed to parse email addresses, and it broke every single line in my CSV file. Took me a whole afternoon to realize the original poster had left out a closing parenthesis, and my friend never even tested it.

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jana8811mo ago

Four hours spent tracking down one missing parenthesis sounds about right. Did you ever get that regex fixed, or did you just give up and write your own parser?

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