Loop Control Variable Reassigned in Body
ID |
java.loop_control_var_reassigned_in_body |
Severity |
low |
Remediation Complexity |
trivial |
Remediation Risk |
low |
Remediation Effort |
low |
Resource |
Reliability |
Language |
Java |
Tags |
reliability |
Rationale
A for loop declares its iteration logic in the header: for (init; condition; update). When the loop variable is also modified inside the body, the iteration becomes non-obvious and hard to reason about. This is a common source of off-by-one errors, infinite loops, or skipped iterations.
// Bad -- loop variable modified in body
for (int i = 0; i < 100; i++) {
i += 3; // skips iterations unpredictably
sum += i;
}Remediation
Rewrite the loop so that the iteration variable is only advanced by the for-header update expression. If the iteration pattern does not fit the standard for form, consider using a while loop instead:
// Good -- only the for-header advances i
for (int i = 0; i < 100; i += 4) {
sum += i;
}