Control Statement Braces
ID |
java.control_statement_braces |
Severity |
info |
Remediation Complexity |
trivial |
Remediation Risk |
low |
Remediation Effort |
low |
Resource |
Best Practice |
Language |
Java |
Tags |
best-practice |
Description
Reports if, else, while, for and do-while statements whose body is a single statement not wrapped in { }.
Rationale
Always bracing control-statement bodies has two benefits:
-
It prevents the "goto fail" / dangling-else class of bug: adding a second statement later silently drops it outside the control flow without any visual cue.
-
It lines up with debuggers: the braces introduce an explicitly-steppable line before the body, so the developer can see whether the branch was entered before the body expression is evaluated.
// Bad
if (x > 0) return;
while (x > 0) x--;
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) System.out.println(i);
// Good
if (x > 0) {
return;
}
while (x > 0) {
x--;
}
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++) {
System.out.println(i);
}else if is not flagged — the body of the outer else is already an if statement, not an open expression.