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Stack Overflow copy-paste turned into a 3AM debugging spree
Grabbed a regex snippet off Stack Overflow for a checkout form at my first job in Austin. It worked fine for 2 weeks, then started eating every comma in the address field. Spent 4 hours at 3AM tracing it back to a single escaped character. Has anyone else had a copy-paste fix that worked too well until it didn't?
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troychen18d ago
Did you at least check the Stack Overflow comments before you grabbed that regex? Because half the time the real warning is buried in the replies, not in the accepted answer itself. I've learned that the hard way more than once, especially with anything that touches user input. The scary part is how a fix can pass testing for weeks, then break on one weird edge case nobody thought to check. What was the actual character that caused it, a comma or something else?
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