Alyssa's Coding Journal

Several years ago, I was trying to extract some images out of an AZW6 container file. With some digging online, I found a script which purported to assist in doing just that, ran it against the container… and it returned an error claiming the target file wasn’t an AZW6 file. It took over an hour of haphazard debugging before I figured out what was wrong: the file’s name was <filename>.azw.res, and the script was assuming that the lack of .azw6 extension meant it wasn’t an AZW6 file, without even bothering to check its internals before throwing that error and shutting down. As soon as I renamed the file to <filename>.azw6 and re-ran the script against it, the extraction went off without a hitch.

This case is illustrative, I think, of why overreliance on filenames as a source of metadata is a bad habit which programmers should do their best to break themselves from.

Keep reading