Jumping in and out of HTML in PHP is a fundamental part of the language but what if you didn't know that? What if you wanted PHP to generate some nicely formatted HTML? Props to Thiemo Mättig for sending in this WTF.

This is probably the most 'clever' way of adding in tabs and new lines to format HTML.

and a little furthur...

Since I'm doing a Shell Scripting with PHP presentation today's WTF is well timed for some shameless self promotion. It's a great example of one of the worst application requirements I've seen.

Props to Eero for sending this in. This script basically rotates an image on a web site. There are dozens of ways to do this with PHP and none of the good ways I know uses an FTP connection!

I particularly like how the permissions are changed to 0777, renamed, and then permissions changed back to 0444! Hmm...

#!/usr/bin/php
<?php
// ftp-connection to change rights
require("ftpconnect.php");
// get actual picture-infos
$filename = "actual_pic.txt";
$file = fopen($filename,"r+");
$actual_pic = fread ($file, filesize ($filename));
fclose($file);
// find out which pic is next
if($actual_pic == 10)
       $new_pic = 1;
else
       $new_pic = $actual_pic + 1;
// write new pic into log
$filename = "actual_pic.txt";
$file = fopen($filename,"w+");
fwrite( $file, $new_pic );
fclose($file);
// change access of folders/files
$ftp_actual_pic = "/www/folder/realpicture.jpg";
$ftp_new_pic = "/www/folder/$new_pic.jpg";
$ftp_folder = "/www/folder";
$chmod=ftp_site($conn_id, "CHMOD 0777 ".$ftp_folder."/realpicture.jpg");
$chmod=ftp_site($conn_id, "CHMOD 0777 ".$ftp_folder."/$new_pic.jpg");
$chmod=ftp_site($conn_id, "CHMOD 0777 ".$ftp_folder);
// rename pictures
rename("superheroes.jpg", "$actual_pic.jpg");
rename("$new_pic.jpg", "realpicture.jpg");
// Folder-Access reset
$chmod=ftp_site($conn_id, "CHMOD 0444 ".$ftp_folder."/realpicture.jpg");
$chmod=ftp_site($conn_id, "CHMOD 0444 ".$ftp_folder."/$actual_pic.jpg");
$chmod=ftp_site($conn_id, "CHMOD 0555 ".$ftp_folder);
ftp_quit($conn_id);
?>

I can think of only one reason why this code exists. Somebody has a web server that does not support scripting and wrote this shell script to rotate the images over FTP via a cron job. Still qualifies as a WTF because anything that automaticaly logs in to make updates to the website is just bad. I can't help thinking this code was written by a 12 year old updating his geocities site...