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Arguments redefined

ID: js/arguments-redefinition
Kind: problem
Security severity: 
Severity: recommendation
Precision: very-high
Tags:
   - efficiency
   - maintainability
Query suites:
   - javascript-security-and-quality.qls

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JavaScript functions can access their arguments by position (rather than by parameter name) through the special arguments object. However, if a function declares a parameter or local variable named arguments, or assigns a new value to arguments, then the arguments object is no longer available. This is confusing and makes code hard to understand, so it should be avoided.

Also note that many popular JavaScript engines (such as V8, which is used by Google Chrome and Node.js) do not support optimization of functions that assign to arguments, so such functions will run more slowly.

Recommendation

Rename the variable to something else.

Example

In the following example, the arguments parameter of function f shadows the special arguments variable. As a result, the arguments object cannot be accessed inside f. To the casual reader, the test x === arguments[0] may look redundant, since normally arguments[0] refers to the first argument (x in this case), which would make the test trivially true. This is not the case here, however, since arguments[0] refers to the first element of the array passed in as the second argument.

function f(x, arguments) {
	if (x === arguments[0])
		return 23;
	return 42;
}

References

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