Today I was going through some old files and found some code with a comment that just said “43”. I have no idea what it meant, so I decided to figure it out.
First, I tried to remember what I was doing when I wrote that code. It was tough, it’s been a while! After racking my brain for what felt like forever, I vaguely recalled working on a project about… wait for it… optimizing something to do with ASCII characters.
So, I opened up an ASCII table to see what 43 is. Turns out, 43 is the decimal representation of the plus “+” symbol in ASCII. What do you know!
Digging Deeper
- I then looked at the code around the comment. There was a function that was doing some sort of calculation.
- I noticed that it was adding values of certain characters together.
- Then it hit me – I probably used 43 in place of the “+” character to simplify the code or maybe just to remind myself of a specific operation.
I ran a few tests, adding some debug statements to print out what was going on, and it was just as I thought. In a bunch of places, I was using 43 as a shortcut for adding a “+” to a string. Probably made sense at the time, but boy, was it confusing later on! I changed the 43 to ‘+’ character, ran it again. Sure enough, the results were just as I expected.
It was kind of funny to think how a simple number like 43 could cause so much confusion. Anyway, I updated the comment to explain what’s going on. Now it says, “// 43 represents the ‘+’ character in ASCII”. Much clearer, right?
This whole thing was a good reminder to always leave clear comments in your code. You might think you’ll remember what you meant, but trust me, you won’t! Especially after a long break. So yeah, that’s the story of how I spent my day figuring out the meaning of 43. Not the most exciting adventure, but it was a good little lesson in code clarity.
