A fractal of BAD developers Pt.1

Recently, we moved a customer's website to one of our servers. The site is written in PHP with all these things you want to avoid: Register globals, bad procedural code, code repetitions, etc.

One of the things we had to deal with was creating the database. Because in every php file the developers were using this code:

$db=mysql_connect("localhost","XXX","YYY");
mysql_select_db("ZZZ",$db);

we forced ended up creating a user XXX with password YYY on database ZZZ (yeah i know, this is where sed might be useful). Joking aside, this is where require statement come in handy. So instead of the above, you may write this:

include "database.php";

and create a database.php file with the following code:

<?php
$db = mysql_connect("localhost","XXX","YYY");
mysql_select_db("ZZZ",$db);

Also, notice the use of the deprecated (and removed from PHP 7) mysql extension.

To be continued...