Unused loop iteration variable¶
ID: js/unused-loop-variable
Kind: problem
Security severity:
Severity: error
Precision: high
Tags:
- maintainability
- correctness
Query suites:
- javascript-security-and-quality.qls
Click to see the query in the CodeQL repository
Most for...in and for...of statements use their iteration variable in the loop body, unless they simply count the number of iterations by incrementing a loop counter in the loop body, or check whether the loop body is executed at all. Loops that do not use their iteration variable but do not fall into one of these two categories may indicate a logic error or typo.
Recommendation¶
Carefully check whether the loop variable should be used. If the variable is genuinely not being used and the code is correct, consider renaming the variable to _ or unused to indicate to readers of the code that it is intentionally unused.
Example¶
In this example, the for...of loop iteration variable x is never used. It appears that the function is intended to count how many elements of the array xs satisfy the filter predicate p, but the programmer forgot to actually pass x as an argument to p.
function countOccurrences(xs, p) {
var count = 0;
for (let x of xs)
if (p())
++count;
return count;
}
To fix this issue, the call p() should be replaced by p(x).