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Rihanna has welcomed her third child with partner A$AP Rocky - and revealed the newborn's quirky name.

She was seen tearing up the prestigious certificate, explaining that she's sending the honour back in fury at what she calls Britain's 'appeasement' of US President Donald Trump .

Most languages these days have some variation of "is string null or empty" as a convenience function. Certainly, C#, the language we're looking at today does. Let's look at a few example of how this can go wrong, from different developers.

We start with an example from Jason, which is useless, but not a true WTF:

/// <summary> /// Does the given string contain any characters? /// </summary> /// <param name="strToCheck">String to check</param> /// <returns> /// true - String contains some characters. /// false - String is null or empty. /// </returns> public static bool StringValid(string strToCheck) { if ((strToCheck == null) || (strToCheck == string.Empty)) return false; return true; }

Obviously, a better solution here would be to simply return the boolean expression instead of using a conditional, but equally obvious, the even better solution would be to use the built-in. But as implementations go, this doesn't completely lose the plot. It's bad, it shouldn't exist, but it's barely a WTF. How can we make this worse?

Well, Derek sends us an example line, which is scattered through the codebase.

if (Port==null || "".Equals(Port)) { /* do stuff */}

Yes, it's frequently done as a one-liner, like this, with the do stuff jammed all together. And yes, the variable is frequently different- it's likely the developer responsible saved this bit of code as a snippet so they could easily drop it in anywhere. And they dropped it in everywhere. Any place a string got touched in the code, this pattern reared its head.

I especially like the "".Equals call, which is certainly valid, but inverted from how most people would think about doing the check. It echos Python's string join function, which is invoked on the join character (and not the string being joined), which makes me wonder if that's where this developer started out?

I'll never know.

Finally, let's poke at one from Malfist. We jump over to Java for this one. Malfist saw a function called checkNull and foolishly assumed that it returned a boolean if a string was null.

public static final String checkNull(String str, String defaultStr) { if (str == null) return defaultStr ; else return str.trim() ; }

No, it's not actually a check. It's a coalesce function. Okay, misleading names aside, what is wrong with it? Well, for my money, the fact that the non-null input string gets trimmed, but the default string does not. With the bonus points that this does nothing to verify that the default string isn't null, which means this could easily still propagate null reference exceptions in unexpected places.

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: strings were a mistake. We should just abolish them. No more text, everybody, we're done.

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The Princess of Wales has demonstrated the ability to communicate through fashion, and nowhere is this more evident than in her evolving collection of coats.

You've read the headlines and heard our experts' opinions - but what do YOU think?

By supporting efficient video codecs in hardware, which to be fair will also help punters

Google, Meta, and Vodafone have called on chipmakers and smartphone manufacturers to support the AV1 video codec in hardware, especially in midrange devices, a suggestion that’s not entirely altruistic.…

Activist Hamit Coskun, 51, shouted 'f*** Islam', 'Islam is religion of terrorism' and 'Koran is burning', as he held a flaming Islamic text aloft outside the Turkish consulate during a protest in Knightsbridge.

National House Building Council data shows bungalows made up 11% of new homes in 1990, but just 1% last year. It's run below 2% since 2010.

Movers have cleared out a $4.1 million Los Angeles mansion rented by D4vd, the singer at the center of a grisly murder probe involving a dismembered teenage girl.

I always paid what was asked of me, and submitted a final meter reading when I moved out of the shop - but now it is threatening debt collectors.

A teenager was killed along the same stretch of road in a previous incident, with locals saying they are desperate for the road to be made safer

As ban on under-16s using some sites looms, cyber-safety regulator sends Microsoft’s code locker a letter

Australia’s eSafety Commissioner has written to GitHub to ask it to consider if it’s a social network that endangers children.…

Locals reported hearing a 'loud bang' before spotting the blaze, with one saying they felt their house shake.

There are a number of RSPCA branches in Essex, along with the affiliated Danaher Animal Home, with pets looking for forever homes.

Wonderful pictures of wildlife, such as pheasants, hares and deer, make up this beautiful spread of life around mid Essex.

There are a number of RSPCA branches in Essex, along with the affiliated Danaher Animal Home, with pets looking for forever homes.

They plan to be 50 per cent affordable housing

'Apparently they can really mess up your teeth,' she said. 'I'd never had a filling before, and I have one now.' Leading dentists say her experience reflects a troubling trend...

A traveller has vented her frustration over an 'infuriating' problem after she paid extra for legroom on a flight.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Guardian: The world's oceans have failed a key planetary health check for the first time, primarily due to the burning of fossil fuels, a report has shown. In its latest annual assessment, the Potsdam Institute for Climate Impact Research said ocean acidity had crossed a critical threshold for marine life. This makes it the seventh of nine planetary boundaries to be transgressed, prompting scientists to call for a renewed global effort to curb fossil fuels, deforestation and other human-driven pressures that are tilting the Earth out of a habitable equilibrium. The report, which follows earlier warnings about ocean acidity, comes at a time of recordbreaking ocean heat and mass coral bleaching. Oceans cover 71% of the Earth's surface and play an essential role as a climate stabilizer. The new report calls them an "unsung guardian of planetary health", but says their vital functions are threatened. The 2025 Planetary Health Check noted that since the start of the industrial era, oceans' surface pH has fallen by about 0.1 units, a 30-40% increase in acidity, pushing marine ecosystems beyond safe limits. Cold-water corals, tropical coral reefs and Arctic marine life are especially at risk. This is primarily due to the human-caused climate crisis. When carbon dioxide from oil, coal and gas burning enters the sea, it forms carbonic acid. This reduces the availability of calcium carbonate, which many marine organisms depend upon to grow coral, shells or skeletons. Near the bottom of the food chain, this directly affects species like oysters, molluscs and clams. Indirectly, it harms salmon, whales and other sea life that eat smaller organisms. Ultimately, this is a risk for human food security and coastal economies. Scientists are concerned that it could also weaken the ocean's role as the planet's most important heat absorber and its capacity to draw down 25-30% of the carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Marine life plays an important role in this process, acting as a "biotic bump" to sequester carbon in the depths. In the report, all of the other six breached boundaries -- climate change, biosphere integrity, land system change, freshwater use, biogeochemical flows, and novel entities -- showed a worsening trend. But the authors said the addition of the only solely ocean-centerd category was a alarming development because of its scale and importance.

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