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Assignment where comparison was intended

ID: cpp/assign-where-compare-meant
Kind: problem
Security severity: 
Severity: error
Precision: high
Tags:
   - reliability
   - correctness
   - external/cwe/cwe-481
Query suites:
   - cpp-security-and-quality.qls

Click to see the query in the CodeQL repository

This rule finds uses of the assignment operator = in places where the equality operator == would make more sense. This is a very common mistake in C and C++, because of the similarity of the = and the == operator, and the fact that the if statement accepts a condition with an integral type, instead of limiting it to just the bool type.

The rule flags every occurrence of an assignment in a position where its result is interpreted as a truth value. An assignment is only flagged if its right hand side is a compile-time constant.

Recommendation

Check to ensure that the flagged expressions are not typos. If an assignment is really intended to be treated as a truth value, it may be better to surround it with parentheses.

Example

if(p = NULL) { //most likely == was intended. Otherwise it evaluates to the value
               //of the rhs of the assignment (which is NULL)
 ...
}

References

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