No, its nothing concerning Sicilians or land wars in Asia, its worse!
Check out the following snippet of VB6 code
Dim lengthOfFile As Integer
lengthOfFile = LOF(fileHandle)wholeFile = Input(lengthOfFile, #fileHandle)
Dim inStrPos As Integer
inStrPos = InStr(0, wholeFile, OldFileName, vbBinaryCompare)If (inStrPos > 0) Then
‘ We have a match
End if
Nothing particularly wrong with that code, but I kept on getting “Run time error 5 : Invalid procedure call or argument”
After much more deliberation and cogitation that it deserved, I realised I had fallen victim to one of the classic Visual Basic blunders? Have you guessed what I’m about to reveal? Thats right, Visual Basic array functions start from 1 NOT 0… Gah! I’ve done too much C# lately, bah, easy to forget. Whats really galling, is arrays in VB start at 0, but can be rebased with an option switch, one thats not on by default. So why arrays at zero, but all functions for arrays at 1? bah.
The code line should read
Dim inStrPos As Integer
inStrPos = InStr(1, wholeFile, OldFileName, vbBinaryCompare)
Hopefully I’ll be done with this legacy codebase in the next 6 months, then it can be laid to rest for good.
