> Surely the correct answer is "use some established third party library that does this exact task well". Probably faster, better battle tested against weird in

> Surely the correct answer is "use some established third party library that does this exact task well". Probably faster, better battle tested against weird input, localised etc etc than anything you can come up with by yourself. The point of questions like this is to test basic understanding, not the ability to search on SO or similar. > If I was hiring though, I'd be more worried about hiring people who would write standard elements from scratch (mostly because that's more fun) than re-use standard building blocks to get a task done correctly. As long as the hire is able to fix/extend the 3rd party library on their own... this is exactly what you figure out with "these types of questions".