The fact that you didn't hear from me yesterday validates the need for a solution that can help prevent people from innocently consuming food substances that don't agree with their digestive system. It's scary how we're always one wrong meal away from needing medical attention yet we must take on this risk roughly three times daily 😓.
A COMMON PROBLEM
With the above out of the way, let's talk about more interesting information, shall we? 😉 So I was writing code recently where the program is supposed to respond to specific inputs, a colleague looked at my code and asked "what if there's a space before or after the input? you know the program won't recognize the input". This brings me to a common problem that netizens face, at other times, when we copy and paste passwords or values, we at times copy them with a space in front or behind the words, other times, you mistakenly tapped the spacebar before and after the input. If the program is expecting a specific input this might create a problem.
THE SOLUTION IS EASY, THE HARD PART IS REMEMBERING TO IMPLEMENT IT
A lot of times, specific keywords are programmed into a software solution in order to trigger certain activities or feedback in the event the end-user inputs something that matches the programmed keyword, being the casing of the letters or the spacing can sometimes cause the machine to misunderstand your input. Thankfully this problem has an easy fix and as long as software engineers remember to implement this fix, everything will turn out fine, from my story earlier, it's obvious that sometimes we get carried away with our responsibilities and forget to add simple features.
A RELATABLE EXPLANATION
".Trim()" is a method that is found in a lot of programming languages and it serves the purpose of removing the spaces before and after a text input, what this means is that the program ignores the space(s) and processes the input as if the space was never there. ".ToUpper()"
, and ".ToLower()" are methods that convert the text input to Uppercase and Lowercase respective and can be really handy in ensuring that the inputs are in a consistent format for the program to store, process, and respond to. ".ToString()" is a method that converts any text input to a string (word) format, this is really useful in cases where the end-user may send in numbers and you want them to be stored and processed as words, not integers (1 is not the same as "1" in programming 😂).
FINALLY
While the methods I've written about are pretty useful, we don't use them all the time, there are times when we want absolute specificity, your password for example will be left in the same way you inputted it so the software solution can be as secure as possible. There's so much to know (and constantly remember) in the field of programming. There are times when the difference between great software and a terrible one is a missing method or a letter at times. Having fresh/external eyes evaluate the code of a software engineer typically helps in ensuring that we're following best practices, it's kind of like having your work proofread 😏.