Someone has pointed out that you may not be addressing the original issue, so please read this carefully.
The XY problem is a communication problem encountered in help desks and similar situations, in which the person asking for help obscures the real issue, X, because instead of asking directly about issue X, they ask how to solve a secondary issue, Y, which they believe will enable them to resolve issue X. However, resolving issue Y often does not resolve issue X, or is an ineffective way of resolving it, and the obscuring of the real issue and the introduction of the potentially strange secondary issue can lead to the person trying to help facing unnecessary communication difficulties and/or offering ineffective solutions.
The XY problem is commonly encountered in technical support or customer service environments where the end user has attempted to solve the problem on their own and misunderstands the true nature of the problem, believing that their real problem, X, has already been solved, apart from some minor detail, Y, in their solution. The support staff’s inability to resolve the end user’s actual problem or to understand the nature of their enquiry may cause the end user to become frustrated. The situation often becomes clear when the end user asks about a seemingly trivial detail that is disconnected from any useful end goal. The solution for support staff is to ask probing questions about why the information is needed, in order to identify the root cause and redirect the end user away from an unproductive line of enquiry.
What is it?
The XY problem is asking about your attempted solution rather than your actual problem.
In other words, you are trying to solve problem X, and you think solution Y would work, but instead of asking about X when you run into trouble, you ask about Y.
====== The Problem ======
This can be frustrating for people trying to help you solve the problem, because by the time you ask about it, the solution you need help with may not have any obvious connection to the problem you’re trying to solve.
How to avoid it To avoid falling into this trap, always include information about the broader context alongside any proposed solution. If someone asks for more information, or particularly a more specific question, do provide details. If there are other solutions which you believe will be suggested and which you’ve already ruled out, then don’t try to avoid going over them again – instead, state why you’ve ruled them out, as this provides more information about your requirements and helps others provide better answers.
A recent IRC conversation by way of illustration:
Q: Is there a function to return a string between two delimiters?
B: I don’t understand what you mean, but I doubt there’s already a function
C: Split and slice
D: ‘Partition’ as well
Q: I tried partition
Q: I was trying to use built-in functions to extract the number from a string like this: “attribute1: 50.223, attribute2: 442.1”
D: Why not just parse the string?
Q: I thought there might have been some built-in parsing functions
D: pairs = [x.strip() for x in s.split(“,”)]; attribs = {k: v for x in pairs for k, v in [x.split(“: ”)]}
D: There are a few libraries, but simple formats are easy enough – if you don’t mind not handling errors
D: Where possible, it is preferable to change the source to use a well-known format, such as JSON or YAML
Q: This code actually comes from HTML
Q: But I don’t know how to parse JavaScript using HTMLParser or whatever it’s called
D: Is it simply embedded in HTML, or some mangled version of HTML?
Q: It’s embedded in the HTML
D: If it’s JavaScript (and it is, apart from the missing outer braces), JSON can probably parse it
Q: Thanks
D: I didn’t say it explicitly: JSON only parses data structures, not JavaScript code
Q: All I need parsed is a data structure
The problem is actually about how to parse JavaScript data structures, not finding ‘a string between two delimiters’, yet it takes quite a bit of time and intuition to get to the real issue.
This is easier to do in a fully interactive chat (regardless of the mode), but on a Stack Exchange site, where you polish a post a bit, post it, and then have 5–30 minutes, or longer, before receiving feedback, it really helps to head in the right direction from the start.
The XY problem involves asking about your attempted solution rather than your actual problem. This leads to an enormous amount of wasted time and energy, both for those asking for help and for those providing it.
The user wants to do X.
The user doesn’t know how to do X, but thinks they can muddle their way to a solution if they can just manage to do Y.
The user doesn’t know how to do Y either.
The user asks for help with Y.
Others try to help the user with Y, but are confused because Y seems like a strange problem to want to solve.
After much back-and-forth and wasted time, it finally becomes clear that the user really wants help with X, and that Y wasn’t even a suitable solution for X.
The problem arises when people get fixated on what they believe to be the solution and are unable to take a step back and explain the issue in full.
Always include information about the bigger picture alongside any attempted solution.
If someone asks for more information, do provide details.
If there are other solutions you’ve already ruled out, explain why you’ve ruled them out. This provides more insight into your requirements.
Remember that if your diagnostic theories were accurate, you wouldn’t be asking for help, would you?
—
# Examples
Example 1
n00b doesn’t actually want the last 3 characters in a filename; he wants the file extensions, so why ask for the last 3 characters?
<n00b> How can I display the last three characters of a filename?
<feline> If they’re in a variable: echo ${foo: -3}
<feline> Why 3 characters? What do you REALLY want?
<feline> Do you want the file extension?
<n00b> Yes.
<feline> There’s no guarantee that every filename will have a three-letter extension,
<feline> so simply picking three characters at random does not solve the problem.
<feline> echo ${foo##*.}
If Angela had simply started by explaining that she wants to prevent others from detecting her OS, this could have been a much shorter and more productive discussion.
Angela: ‘nmap -O -A 127.0.0.1’ returns some lines starting with ‘OS:’. How can I change this?
Obama: Look at the source code for nmap, work out how it identifies the Linux component, then rewrite your TCP/IP stack so that it doesn’t operate in a way that nmap can detect.
Angela: Yeah, but I don’t know anything about the Linux system API.
Obama: Well, nmap’s fingerprint is based on the way the TCP/IP stack works; there’s no real way round it except to rewrite the relevant parts of that stack.
Angela: I really need to avoid these messages. Can iptables do this?
Obama: Well, don’t use OS detection or version scanning
Angela: I want to stop others from finding out what type of OS I’m running
The X and Y Problem can be resolved by clearly stating exactly what you want to do and what you have already tried.