End of the World Animation

This is old but still my favorite flash video (posting the Youtube video version so I can embed it):



Yours,

Replace x 100

When you see the next few lines, you may have the urge to run away. Or at least to close this browser. That is, if you have an aversion to programming, code and other technical things that many people do not really like. Sometimes, I don't like them either. Let me assuage your fears, you don't need to be familiar with any programming concepts to understand what I'm about to say.

There are these things called "Stored Procedures". It's something that sits around and when triggered, does something. That's all. I opened one of them here at work to see what it did. Then I burst out laughing. Because I saw this:

replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace(replace((i.description),'&','&amp;'),'&amp;#','&#'),'™','&#8482;'),'>','&gt;'),'<','&lt;'),'"','&quot;'),char(39),'&apos;'),'—','-'),'&#145;','&apos;'),'&#146;','&apos;'),'&#133;','...'),'&#147;','&quot;'),'&#148;','&quot;'),'®','&#174;')

If you know nothing about code, you still should be able to see the hilarious nature of this. Basically, it's taking in a string (you can think of a string as a word) and replacing all characters to be SQL friendly. In other words, if your word was "O...M...G", it would replace all the '...' .

But seriously, how would anyone understand what this is doing? Is the best way to do this really to have a million replace statements in one line? I don't know everything (or much) about SQL but to my non-expert eyes, this does not look good.

If someone wants to tell me that this is standard and done all the time and is perfect then I'll humbly admit defeat. But for now, I'll keep giggling.

Yours,