Misspelled variable name¶
ID: js/misspelled-variable-name
Kind: problem
Security severity:
Severity: warning
Precision: very-high
Tags:
- maintainability
- readability
- correctness
Query suites:
- javascript-security-and-quality.qls
Click to see the query in the CodeQL repository
If a reference to a local variable is accidentally misspelled, it will be interpreted as a reference to an implicitly declared global variable, which may indicate a bug. Even if this is intentional, it should be avoided as it makes the code hard to read.
Recommendation¶
Correct the misspelling.
Example¶
The following code snippet attempts to loop over an array ids in order to update DOM nodes referenced by the elements of the array. Note, however, that the upper bound of the loop is specified as lenght, a typo for the local variable length. At runtime, lenght will evaluate to undefined, so the check i < lenght will always fail, and the loop body is never executed.
function selectElements(ids) {
for (var i=0, length=ids.length; i<lenght; ++i) {
var id = ids[i];
if (id) {
var element = document.getElementById(id);
element.className += " selected";
}
}
}
The misspelling should be corrected by replacing lenght with length.
References¶
D. Crockford: JavaScript: The Good Parts, Appendix A: Awful Parts, Global Variables. O’Reilly, 2008.