Repeated If Conditions
ID |
go.duplicate_else_if_conditions |
Severity |
low |
Remediation Complexity |
trivial |
Remediation Risk |
low |
Remediation Effort |
low |
Resource |
Reliability |
Language |
Go |
Tags |
dead-code, reliability, suspicious-comparison |
Description
Reports if / else if / … chains in which two branches share the same condition. The second
occurrence is unreachable — anything matching the duplicated condition fires the first branch —
and is almost always a copy-paste error.
Rationale
A duplicate condition is dead code that masks a bug. The developer probably meant to change the operator or comparison value in one of the branches; tests rarely catch it because the data falls into the first branch as designed, so the defect stays latent until a refactor exposes it.
func classify(x int) string {
if x == 1 {
return "one"
} else if x == 2 {
return "two"
} else if x == 1 { // FLAW — duplicate of the first condition, unreachable
return "unreachable"
}
return "other"
}Remediation
Fix the duplicated condition — the repeated branch was likely meant to test a different value — or remove it if it is genuinely redundant.