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Useless type test

ID: js/useless-type-test
Kind: problem
Security severity: 
Severity: error
Precision: very-high
Tags:
   - maintainability
   - correctness
   - language-features
   - external/cwe/cwe-570
   - external/cwe/cwe-571
Query suites:
   - javascript-security-and-quality.qls

Click to see the query in the CodeQL repository

In ECMAScript 5, the typeof operator returns one of the following six type tags: "undefined", "boolean", "number", "string", "object", "function". In ECMAScript 2015, it may additionally return "symbol", while on older versions of Internet Explorer it may return "unknown" or "date" in certain situations. Comparing it against any other string literal is therefore useless.

Recommendation

Carefully examine the comparison in question. If the type tag is simply misspelled, correct it. In some cases, the type tag returned by typeof is not sufficiently precise, so you may have to use other type test functions.

Example

The following code snippet tries to determine whether a is an array:

if (typeof a === 'array')
	console.log("It's an array!");

Note that typeof is not precise enough to distinguish arrays from other objects, since it returns the type tag "object" for both. ECMAScript 5-compatible platforms provide a library function Array.isArray that can be used instead:

if (Array.isArray(a))
	console.log("It's an array!");

On older platforms, you can use the technique explained on the Mozilla Developer Network.

References

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